Kirkus Reviews Online has sent us a copy of their review of The Magical Life of Long Tack Sam.
Just about every aspect of Canadian independent filmmaker and animator Fleming’s first foray into graphic literature dazzles like a Broadway marquee.
Using as a springboard for this illustrated memoir her award-winning 2003 documentary film of the same title, Fleming tells the amazing, forgotten story of her great-grandfather, Long Tack Sam (1895–1961). He was one of the 20th century’s most famous magicians, playing the Palace Theatre, Broadway’s top vaudeville house, more often even than Houdini. The rise to popular glory of a small acrobat from a village in China offers his great-granddaughter an opportunity for her own journey of self-discovery. Just as Sam’s variety show captivated audiences from Shanghai to New Zealand and New York, Fleming aims here to enchant both young and old with a fascinating scrapbook-style narrative. It’s vividly illustrated and quite moving, particularly the portrait of transcontinental love between Sam and Austrian shopgirl Leopoldine Roesler, who married in 1908. What really distinguishes the work, however, is its collage-like, collaborative form.
Fleming underscores her belief that “it’s hard to know what is true” by including the different versions of Sam’s history she encountered in various sources; she chose to have these multiple possibilities illustrated by Julian Lawrence in the ravishing style of a 1930s comic. Gently connecting the dots among episodes in Sam’s life, offering captions for the photos and for the found objects from his career, is “Stickgirl,” a charming persona drawn by Fleming herself. She narrates the work as a friend sitting next to you on the couch might annotate the pages of a family photo album, an approach that creates great intimacy. Meanwhile, a timeline of important 20th-century events runs alongside the personal narrative, illustrating how daily life is subject to world affairs. A touching, playful tribute to a vaudeville giant—and so much more.
"Magical barely begins to describe the enchanting narrative unveiled on the reapes of this "illustrated memoir," the daring first venture into graphic lit from award-winning Canadian independent filmmaker and animator Ann Marie Fleming. Nearly two years in the making, Fleming's work takes as its template her 2003 documentary film of the same name, whose mesmerizing subject, Long Tack Sam (1895-1961), was not only one of the 29th century's most evered magicians and vaudevillians - achieving worldwide Houdini-like fame - but also happened to be the author's great-grandfather. "I dedicate both the film and the book to my grandmother (Long's daughter), who I was very close to, and who die 20 years ago," she says. "I was close to her, yet I didn't know any of this." Though aware that Long Tack Sam had left his native China and, in 1908, married Leopoldine Roesler of Linz, Austria, Fleming was shocked to learn that he first trained as an acrobat, went on to lead a Chinese variety show and bsically was "famous his whole career," she says. The memoir then centers as much on Long's amazing life - richly illustrated through snapshots and comic sequences, and smartly contextualized with an accompanying time line historical miscellany - as Fleming's relation to it, subtly emphasized through the charming figure "Stickgirl."
Aesthetically we to the principle of her work's form matching its subject, Fleming says 'zines gave her the "permission" to take a scrapbook-like approach in telling Long's story. "Collage, of course, is the nature of the film, and the nature of Long Tack Sam;s life an show, really," she says. "My question was, 'Can I be personable using a collage technique on the page... or is it emotionally alienating?" Like her great grandfather's global audience, readers of all ages will delight in the warmth, humanity and playfulness of this inspiring tale of geopolitical awareness. "
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