Posted in: Comics | Tagged: louise brooks, mcsmesh

McSmesh Creating a Louise Brooks Biographical Comic, Contributors Welcome

Published Thu, 02 Jan 2020 11:00:49 -0600

Bleeding Cool has learned that comic book creator McSmesh aka 'Sage' is working away on an extensive warts-and-all Louise Brooks comic book biography.

Brooks, was an American film actress and dancer during the 1920s and 1930s. She is noted as a 'flapper' icon and sex symbol, and is famous for her bob hairstyle that she helped popularize during the prime of her career. She starred in seventeen silent films and eight sound films including Pandora's Box, before retiring in 1938. Brooks published her memoir, Lulu in Hollywood, in 1982, three years later she died of a heart attack at age 78.

In a 1979 profile by The New Yorker, theatre critic and writer Kenneth Tynan described her as "the most seductive, sexual image of Woman ever committed to celluloid. She's the only unrepentant hedonist, the only pure pleasure-seeker, I think I've ever known." By her own admission, Brooks was a sexually liberated woman, unafraid to experiment, posing nude for art photography, and her liaisons with many film people were legendary, although much of it remains speculation. She also enjoyed fostering speculation about her sexuality, cultivating friendships with lesbian and bisexual women including Pepi Lederer and Peggy Fears, but eschewing relationships. She admitted to some lesbian dalliances, including a one-night stand with Greta Garbo and later described Garbo as a "charming and tender lover". However she declined to consider herself lesbian or bisexual.

Her influence has remained strong across the decades, across media. Characters such as Sally Bowles in Bob Fosse's 1972 film Cabaret, Melanie Griffith as Lulu in Jonathan Demme's Something Wild, Isabella Rosselini as Lisle von Rhoman in Death Becomes Her were all based on Brooks. The movie The Chaperone based on the book of the same name, depicts Brooks' initial arrival in New York, plus her career decline as an actress and starred stars Haley Lu Richardson and Elizabeth McGovern. Brooks' film persona served as the literary inspiration for Adolfo Bioy Casares when he wrote his science fiction novel The Invention of Morel about a man attracted to a woman who is only a projected 3-D image. In her 2011 horror novel, Houdini Heart, Ki Longfellow uses Brooks as a character in the leading character's visions. In Gayle Forman's novels Just One Day and Just One Year, the protagonist is called "Lulu" because her bobbed hair resembles Brooks. Brooks also inspired the long-running Dixie Dugan newspaper strip by John H. Striebel, loosely based on Louise's days as a Follies girl on Broadway. She also inspired the erotic comic books Valentina, by the late Guido Crepax who became a friend and regular correspondent with Louise late in her life. Hugo Pratt, also used her as inspiration for characters, and even named them after her. Brooks was the visual model for the character of Ivy Pepper in Tracy Butler's Lackadaisy comic series and Rick Geary published a 2015 graphic novel entitled Louise Brooks: Detective in which Brooks, "her movie career having sputtered to a stop," returns to her native Kansas and becomes a private investigator who solves murders.

And now McSmesh is working on a new comic book project, to be adapted from Brook's autobiographical essays 'Lulu in Hollywood', published by the University of Minnesota Press. As yet no publisher has been officially connected, and the other contributors are yet to be officially announced, but we have it on good authority that Jessica Martin, also known for biographies of the Hollywood greats is likely to be one of the other main artists involved. And she is happy to talk to others… Developing.