Muybridge
Cartoonist: Guy Delisle
Translators: Helge Dasher and Rob Aspinall
Publisher: Drawn & Quarterly
Publication Date: April 2025
With his new book Muybridge, Guy Delisle continues to make a case for himself as the most versatile cartoonist in all of comics. I can only speak to his work that has been translated into English, but consider three of the books Delisle has completed over the past decade.
In 2017, Delisle put out Hostage, the chilling re-telling of a true story in which an administrator with Doctors Without Borders was kidnapped and held hostage. That book reads almost like a horror story, a tense and frightening account of a horrendous ordeal. A few years later, Delisle then put out Factory Summers, a memoir specific to a job he worked for three summers as a high school-aged student. Among my favorite Delisle books, Factory Summers is a clear-eyed memoir that captures a sort of youthful ennui inherent to temporary work, a time when you first brush up against the real world and start to figure out the place you want to make for yourself within it.
Delisle is a prolific creator, and these are just two of his works, of course. Still, they speak to Delisle’s versatility, especially when taken along with his new book, Muybridge. In the simplest of terms, this book is a well-researched and fascinating biography of the pioneering photographer, Eadweard Muybridge. It covers his life, what he accomplished, his involvement with the robber baron who founded Stanford University, his murdering of his wife’s lover without much consequence (it’s definitely not a halo-polishing biography), and what drove him to ultimately be the first to capture motion on film.
A straight-forward telling of Muybridge’s life with comics would have been fascinating enough, but what really elevates Muybridge for me are the sequences in which Delisle delves into the technical achievements that Muybridge pioneered. While they fit into the book seamlessly, make no mistake — Delisle is fearless with how technical he’s willing to get here, paneling it out in ways that are both easy for non-technical folks (myself included) to understand and are entertaining. These technical deep dives really serve to emphasis how driven and obsessed with his work Muybridge was, ultimately raising questions about the type of personality that is necessary to achieve new things.
I’m definitely not the sort of reader who actively wants to learn the ins and outs of how the first motion captures were achieved by humanity, and Delisle still reeled me in. There’s an element of getting the medicine to go down with a spoonful of sugar to it. Another cool touch within this book is the inclusion of the actual (and often famous) photographs that Muybridge took in his life. Chances are, you may have seen some of them. Having lived in Sacramento for a time myself, I saw Muybridge’s photo of Yosemite National Park constantly, but I never had any idea who took it, let alone the human story behind how it came to be.
Moreover, Muybridge is just another work from a reliably excellent cartoonist, one who no matter what direction he is pulled by his creative interests, is certain to find a poignant story to tell within.
Muybridge is available now via D&Q as well as wherever comics and books are sold near you!
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