The Giant: Orson Welles, the Artist and the Shadow

Orson Welles’s volatile persona and roller-coaster career animate this gloriously unruly graphic biography by Daoudi (Monk!). Paying homage to the filmmaker’s fourth wall–breaking style, the volume opens with Welles in gladiatorial swagger, declaring “I’m back in town and I want a rematch” as he looms over the Hollywood sign. From there, Daoudi strings together anecdotes from across Welles’s life, such as when he beat Manhattan traffic by darting to his gigs (staging Julius Caesar as a Nazi allegory, producing radio programs, recording commercial voiceovers) in ambulances. Daoudi peppers the script with Welles’s mix of braggadocio, self-sabotage, and self-awareness (“The only thing I want written on my tombstone: ‘He never did Love Boat’ ”). The filmmaker’s rapid rise and long fall is framed against the doomed 1970s production of The Other Side of the Wind, his never-finished semi-autobiographical film. The rough but energetic art suits the drama and verve of its subject, portraying Welles alternately with flowing scarf and brandished cigar like an artistic gunslinger and other times in hulking, despondent gloom. His self-criticisms are represented as shouts from the subconscious: “Nobody stopped you from making more Citizen Kanes!” It’s an incisive look at an artist who never recovered from the success of his youth. (May)