Nick Cave’s life story is set to be immortalised in a new graphic novel from Reinhard Kleist. The German cartoonist, best known for his 2009 biography of Johnny Cash, is promising a “terrifying conflation of Cave songs, biographical half-truths and complete fabulations.”
Nick Cave: Mercy on Me will explore Cave’s career from The Birthday Party to The Bad Seeds. Or, as Kleist himself put it, we’ll be “starting with his childhood and ending in the apocalypse.” As the illustrator rightly asks: “Where else would a book about Nick Cave end?”
Kleist’s works haven’t always concerned the lives of high profile musicians like Cave. Notably, his 2011 book The Boxer looked at the life of Jewish boxer Harry Haft; while his 2015 release, The Dream of Olympia, told the story of Somali runner Samua Yusaf Omar who tragically drowned on route to Europe on a migrant boat.
Nick Cave’s story has been told a number of times, most recently by the artist himself in the 2014 film 20,000 Days On Earth — a fictionalised account of a day in his life, packed with cameos from friends and fellow musicians.
Nick Cave: Mercy on Me is due September 7th — that’s just two more weeks until you can Cave dive