“Bluesman” collected in hardcover format
By Matthew Price
WORD BALLOONS
The 1920s period thriller graphic novel “Bluesman,” by Norman writer Rob Vollmar, was released in June in a collected edition hardcover.
Originally serialized in three parts, “Bluesman” is the story of traveling musician Lem Taylor, on the run in late 1920s Arkansas.
Vollmar intends the graphic novel to explore “the foundations of some of the same issues of faith, power, and race that dominate our social conversation today,” he said in a recent interview.
The artist of “Bluesman” is Spain’s Pablo Callejo. Callejo previously collaborated with Vollmar on the Eisner-Award-nominated “The Castaways,” and is currently working to illustrate Ted Rall’s “The Year of Loving Dangerously.”
Film in works
“Bluesman” was optioned for film, with blues artist Keb’ Mo’ attached to produce the soundtrack. Though Vollmar couldn’t disclose much on the film front, he did say “if the current casting plans pan out, the ‘Bluesman’ soundtrack may be one of the most exciting releases for fans of blues and R&B music in a very long time.”
The primary change between the serialized format and the collected hardcover is one of consistency, Vollmar said.
“Writing and drawing it over three years made it harder to maintain that page-to-page, chapter-to-chapter consistency so having this opportunity to look at it all at once and make those adjustments proved invaluable,” he said.
Response to “Bluesman” has been near-uniformly positive, with favorable reviews from Entertainment Weekly and the LA Times, among others.
In the future, Vollmar hopes to complete a graphic novel about Frank Zappa. He’s also developing graphic novels on the Tulsa race riots of 1921 and the apostle Paul.
“Aside from that, I’m still writing new stories for ‘Tales from the Crypt,’ but will be spending most of the rest of this year promoting ‘Bluesman,’” he said.
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