Now THIS! This I like. This was fascinating!! I had no idea that there was someone who went around recording this important folk songs from African-Americans for the Library of Congress. Without these men and women singing gospel, folk and blues there would be no rock music, no Elvis, no Beatles, no Black Sabbath. Bonus: The art is really lovely!!

The story of John Lomax and his efforts to record and preserve folk music (which also encompassed both rural blues and traditional work chants) is a great story. Alas, this is not a great book. Between the rudimentary art style and the choppy kind of storytelling things never really get going. I'm not sure there's enough information to fill in the blanks for those who are unfamiliar with Lomax (and son), at the same time I don't believe there is much to appeal to those who might already know the story.

As others have said it gets a bit heavy-handed with the racial stuff. While that is probably closer to the truth of the times than we would like to believe, it ends up distracting from the story of how these people were able to cope by using the music as a means to escape those hardships both spiritually and, in some cases, literally. It tends to make them bystanders in a story that should belong to them as much as to Lomax.

-- This book contains racial slurs and imagery. Not for the easily offended.

***I received a digital copy of this title from NetGalley.

The panel composition is simple and the art is pleasant enough but nothing especially pretty. Some panels, when the characters were in the dark or shadow, was mostly black or had heavy hatching. This gave it a muddy feel at times. The simplistic, cartoonish art style gave the characters an almost caricature look- when this happened with the black characters it felt a bit…not right. Maybe I’m being sensitive but if the comic was in color or the art was different this could have been avoided. The story is slow and kind of meandering. I wish there was more focus on the songs and people who sang them rather than Lomax and his son. While I think this is a nice part of history and I think the work Lomax and his son did were great, the way the comic presents it had a bit of a white savior vibe- especially since every other white character is violently racist. While it can be hard to capture the beauty and impact of song in words or comics I feel attempts could have been made to do so. Shounen Note by Yuhki Kamatani which is a manga about singing evokes a feeling while reading that I though only music could do.
Lomax is a nice comic and a nice part of history to learn about but the art and the story of the comic is nothing much really. An Ok read

Lomax duo of son and father are on pursuit of a rare thing.
They travel in distant villages to record folk songs from whole of the countryside America.
This graphic novel shows events and their journey.
I liked the excellent artwork and characters shown.
It is set in old times when there were social structure was not good for black men.
I liked character of fat and thin singer duo.
A good historical graphic novel. It shows that Lomax were inspiration for Bob Dylan. That is a great fact to know.

The Lomax story is an interesting one and brings to mind many folks songs and songs of the people, however the richness and depth of the story are overpowered by the minstrel and demeaning way people of color are drawn. The artist should study or hire someone capable of drawing them and their features correctly. As these people and their songs enriched the Library'system catalog and introduced the world to many, their greatness should be reflected. The art damages the comic for me.

Lomax is a clever illustrated study in folk art, culture, and the use of shadow to convey emotion. Well worth the read.

As other reviewers mentioned, these depictions are at a minimum too close to racist depictions, I can't get past that. It's a shame, I think the story that is being told is really interesting. I did like the drawing of street scenes.

"To this day, Bob Dylan and Bruce Springsteen openly claim to be spiritual sons of Alan Lomax".
-Sebastian Danchin, Historian of Southern culture

John Lomax, born two years after the Civil War, was raised in Texas cotton country. To finance his Harvard college education, he sold his horse. "A professor with innovative ideas showed him that America's troubadour ballads of the dawning 20th century were as eloquent as Homeric verses, medieval lays or Shakespeare's sonnets". In 1910, he published his first anthology of cowboy songs.

In the year 1933, accompanied by this eighteen year old son Alan, he embarked upon a musical journey to record ballads and folk songs for the Library of Congress in Washington, DC. Their goal was "to preserve our folk heritage in recordings...before it vanished forever". Their expedition would take them to plantations, churches and prisons.

In explanation to a farmer, "This is a recording device. You sing into the horn, and it records your voice on this cylinder here". John says, "my job is to help you write your own history". The farmer sings the following:

"Po Farmer, Po Farmer
Dey Git All De Farmer
Make His Clothes is Full of Patches
His Hat is Full of Holes,
Stooping Down Pickin' Cotton
F'om off de Bottom Boll...
His Po' Li'l Wife an' Chillum
Sit at Home in Rags.
Po' Farmer, Work All Week.
Don't Make Enough. It's Hard. It's Hard."

Visiting the Louisana State Penitentiary, John and Alan Lomax were introduced to a murderer, Leadbelly! He had written over five hundred songs and played every instrument. The Lomax recordings were authentic...the songs of chain gangs...of loggers.... of churchgoers. A railroad track supervisor invited John and Alan to visit the rails when his work day began at 3 AM. There was a set of songs to be sung for laying track, different ones for splitting rails.

I had high expectations of absolutely loving this graphic novel, "Lomax: Collectors of Folk Songs" by Frantz Duchazeau. Imagine my disappointment finding a disclaimer stating that due to the time period of the novel (1933), the reader might find the book offensive. It was highly offensive, deflating my enjoyment, despite my love for the musical recordings preserved by both Alan and John Lomax.

Thank you Europe Comics and Net Galley for the ARC in exchange for an honest review.

I love what the Lomaxes did. I loved that they collected music of the down trodden, the cowboys and the chain gangs, and the workers in the fields. So, I was quite happy to get to review this book, of the travels of Alan and his father in the 1930s, as they collected the disappearing folk tradition of work songs.

All the southern people are played for caricatures. The southern sheriffs, the owners of the land where the Black people worked, the other white people in authority.

But, what is it with the French and the way they draw black-face onto, well Black people. I know it is a style, but there are caricatures that are really not in good taste, and perhaps this is not the case in France, but in the US, at least, it is on the offensive side, no matter how good the story itself is.

So, while I would love to promote, and ask you to read this book, if you are offended by the way that Duchazeau draws Black people, it is best to avoid this book.

Thanks to Netgalley for making this book available for an honest review.

A graphic novel snapshot of how John and Alan Lomax went throughout the deep South of the States, recording the traditional music – the chants of the railway layers, the spiritual songs – anything with blues and tradition and home-grown blood and guts about it. They were sure of their purpose, to record for posterity the musical history of these areas, checking out different lyrics to 'Stagger Lee' for example, and making the country much more aware of its country music, through recording in what stood as archive quality at the time for the Library of Congress. But just what kind of world were they entering – and what difference, if any, did their presence and recording equipment make?

I think this was a success, for if you didn't know the story, this window into it is a good one, showing one spell of just one of their journeys. But it's not brilliant. It is really heavy-handed with the racism, portraying these cops as entirely anti-black, these whites as against the Lomaxes for being too familiar with the blacks, and so on. Everyone gets visually stereotyped, from the protuberant lips and sullen faces to the sweating, broad-bellied cops. Beyond that, the visuals are fine – rather uneven in polish at times, for some reason, but cinematically showing off the narrative in a well-directed manner. There are imperfections with the script, too – the book wants to show all the private lives of the pair, but this looks like being John sorry for how Alan's birthday turned out, and some regrets about his dead wife that certainly did little for me, until a line later on very nicely contrasted with what he says in the opening scene.

What I was left with was a final reservation, however – this story is from the point of view of the Lomaxes, and we have to take it as their gospel, and this is I assume a heavily truncated showing of that gospel. I have to assume all these events, people and situations were met, but I didn't get the feel from the script here that I was fully convinced by it being exactly the truth. And when they were there to record the unedited truth, that shows the book was perhaps not quite up to the material. But it was a solid three and a half stars for bringing this father and son back to us.