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Reading lists

8 of the most beautiful graphic novels

And the Dust Bowl Ballads

Woody Guthrie

A visual biography of Woody Guthrie – perhaps the greatest, most enduring singer-songwriter to ever live.

Holds within its pages a tremendous sense of time and place… Hayes has set out on an ambitious path and creates a vivid and unforgiving picture.

An inventive and expansive biography worthy of its subject.

A step up [for Hayes] in ambition and execution… An inventive and expansive biography worthy of its subject.

In a handsome square format, with open spreads as wide as the land itself, Hayes captures the man and the times in his lyrical writing and brush artwork.

This is a passionate picture of Guthrie and his times.

Woody Guthrie And The Dust Bowl Ballads is simply splendid. Hayes’ strong graphic hand and integrated text are wonders to pore over and return to.

Nick Hayes is the author of The Rime of the Modern Mariner, an updating of Coleridge’s famous poem, and the visual biography Woody Guthrie and the Dust Bowl Ballads, both of which are among the most highly regarded of recent British long-form comics. He has also published two collections of his short comics, Lovely Grey Day and 11 Folk Songs. He is the founding editor of Meat magazine, a periodical showcasing new writing, comics and illustration and has won two Guardian Media awards.

Forged in the Dustbowl of the 1930s, in an America crippled by the Great World Recession, this humble man found solace in song, and soon those songs became the voice of the People – men and women who had seen their lives deracinated and destroyed by the vicissitudes of global economic forces beyond their control. 
 
Guthrie’s influence lives on, a touchstone for Bob Dylan, The Clash and the protest singers of the Occupy movement today. With a delighted eye, and an ear for a tune, Nick Hayes’s follow-up to the critically acclaimed Rime of the Modern Mariner brings a legend to life with a generous spirit and crackling moral force its subject would have been proud of.

The Medicine Tree

Nick Hayes

Magnificent illustrations… [Hayes] has done a wondrous job… his visual narrative has an intense, restless pace… here is a ribald beauty you find only rarely between two covers.

At once phantasmagorical and bewitching… the best of his career so far.

Hayes’s green-filtered, stylised illustrations have a breathtaking punch to them.

The Drunken Sailor is an Impressionist hymn to Rimbaud. But Hayes' song is greatly embellished with knowledge... You run the gamut when you read this book.

A bewitching work from one of Britain’s finest graphic novelists.

The Life of the Poet Arthur Rimbaud in His Own Words

The Drunken Sailor traces the life of Arthur Rimbaud: poet, surrealist, libertine and gun runner. In dazzling artwork, Nick Hayes follows Rimbaud from his youth in Ardennes to the poetry salons of Paris, from the absinthe-glazed passion of his relationship with Verlaine to his flight into the jungles of Indonesia and the deserts of Yemen and Egypt. Told entirely in Rimbaud’s own words, from a new translation of Le bateau ivre, The Drunken Sailor confirms Nick Hayes’ place as one of the most talented graphic novelists at work today.

Nick Hayes

Praise for The Drunken Sailor

Magnificent illustrations… [Hayes] has done a wondrous job… his visual narrative has an intense, restless pace… here is a ribald beauty you find only rarely between two covers.

At once phantasmagorical and bewitching… the best of his career so far.

Hayes’s green-filtered, stylised illustrations have a breathtaking punch to them.

Magnificent illustrations… [Hayes] has done a wondrous job… his visual narrative has an intense, restless pace… here is a ribald beauty you find only rarely between two covers.

At once phantasmagorical and bewitching… the best of his career so far.

Hayes’s green-filtered, stylised illustrations have a breathtaking punch to them.

Magnificent illustrations… [Hayes] has done a wondrous job… his visual narrative has an intense, restless pace… here is a ribald beauty you find only rarely between two covers.

At once phantasmagorical and bewitching… the best of his career so far.

Hayes’s green-filtered, stylised illustrations have a breathtaking punch to them.

Books by Nick Hayes

Articles featuring Nick Hayes

8 of the most beautiful graphic novels

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