Freddie & Me by Mike Dawson
Freddie & Me
By Mike Dawson
Bloombury Books
The argument can certainly be made that the majority graphic novels are labors of love. The hours and days and months and years spent alone, pouring over panel after panel, tweaking the subtlest of plot points—lording over nearly every aspect of the creative process—are enough to drive any reasonably lucid person completely mad.
Even in terms of autobiographical comics, however, rarely does that description seem quite so apropos as in the case of Mike Dawson’s epically personal Freddie & Me, a journey into the manner of childhood obsession that, with all due respect to the author, most of us would like to just as soon forget.
Fortunately, for us, however, Dawson doesn’t possess such instincts of self-censorship, nor has he ever seen fit to abandon past obsessions—in fact, if anything, such manners have grown intricately more complex and ingrained into his being life over the years, as beautifully illustrated early on in the book with a timeline that matches the events of three generations of his family to chronologically corresponding releases by Queen—the one obsession that loomed large over the rest for nearly a quarter century of his life.
The same can be said for Dawson’s personal life—over the course of Freddie & Me, friends and girlfriends come and go, loved ones pass on, and his family uproots themselves for a new life across the pond in American. All the while, the only constant in the artist’s life is the music of Freddie Mercury and co., a ubiquitous presence that can’t even be halted by the singer’s death in 1991, an event that seemingly had as much impact in Dawson as the passing of his beloved grandmother, later in life.
Like nearly ever other event in his life, his grandmother’s death has a corresponding notch on Dawson’s Queen timeline, when he and his mother catch a matinee of the musical, We Will Rock You, when visiting England for the funeral.
It’s an effective tool in both lending an air of originality in a field crowded like autobio, and letting Dawson plunge headily into the sincere without getting too bogged down in the sentimental—an issue further avoided by the book’s occasional dream sequences, illustrating imagined moments in the lives of the superstars he worships.
These asides are particularly effective exercises in demonstrating what is perhaps the key conceit of the book: once released into the word, works of art are as much—or perhaps more—the property of fans as the artists who created them, a view reflected in a Mercury quote that opens up the book. In response to a question regarding the meaning of the infamously cryptic “Bohemian Rhapsody,” the singer explains, simply, “I think people should just listen ti I, think about it, and make up their own minds as to what it says to them.”
Through a retrospectively embarrassing talent show rendition of the song, a subsequent comic book for a school project illustrating its meaning, and the eventual publication of Freddie & Me, Dawson has made “Bohemian Rhapsody,” and indeed the entire Queen oeuvre his own, time and again, and has finally emerged with a piece of art the rest of us can call our own.
–Brian Heater
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By Roger Green, August 14, 2008 @ 11:22 pm
Just finished this book; loved it!