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“Paul is Dead”

By | July 14th, 2020
Posted in Reviews | % Comments

Death is a bad trip. Losing someone close to you can give the world a surreal glean. The lines between truth and fiction blur, and you can get lost in the haze and confusion. The world is incomplete. Ernesto Carbonetti and Paolo Baron’s “Paul is Dead,” the newly translated graphic novel about Paul McCartney’s supposed death in 1966, traps John Lennon in a psychedelic fever dream of grief and desperation.

Cover by Ernesto Carbonetti

Written by Paolo Baron
Art by Ernesto Carbonetti
November 1966. London. John Lennon can’t speak. He can’t take his eyes off the photo of a car in flames with Paul McCartney’s body inside. His friend is no longer here, and that means the Beatles are no longer here either. But John wants to know the truth, and with George and Ringo, he will begin to re-examine the final hours of Paul’s life. Set in the magical atmosphere of Abbey Road Studios during the writing sessions for Sgt. Pepper, PAUL IS DEAD is the definitive version of the legend of Paul McCartney’s death.

The Beatles were an all consuming force, leaving behind a head-spinning, large legacy, for music, for their fans, for the members of the band. Sometimes it can be hard to remember; I live in Liverpool, their home city, half a century from the band’s end, the mark of the Beatles is ingrained into the background noise of my city. I’ve covered shifts in Beatles-themed tourist trap bar, without really noticing the Beatlesness of the place. But if, in the mid-60’s, a member of the band died, an empire would fall. It wouldn’t be allowed to happen, so goes the Paul is dead conspiracy theory that inspires this book, he’d need to be secretly replaced with a lookalike. 

The theory is silly, as Paolo Baron says in an afterword of “Paul is Dead,” but it can be used to explore the weight of grief in a context that makes it even heavier. The fame raises these characters above normalcy, they are Greek gods in heightened, mythological world floating above our own. But they are trapped there, their great power doesn’t free them from mortality. They may be bigger than Jesus, but can they perform a resurrection? 

This tension is enthralling for the first half of the book. Carbonetti forces characters into tall, thin panels, leaving little room for breath, washed out in blocks of sickly yellows and bloody reds, hidden in silhouette, it reads like a claustrophobic noir as the band’s poppy psychedelia melts. Beatles manager Brian Epstein is almost sinister as he breaks the news to John from the shadows, wearing a big trench coat with a long black tie. It’s a creepy, off-kilter world, shocked out of reality by a death. The way a lot of the characters are drawn leaves these floaty sketch lines around them like ghosts of alternate, almost selves, while faces can be rendered with this shiny, unreal detailing. What is real and what is fake is blurred, all crammed into these confined panels.

Using a darkened, bizarro version of the psychedelia of The Beatles as an entry into the surreal world of grieving is inspired. Where “Paul is Dead” begins to fall apart is when the noir tone becomes a noir plot. After John’s big initial reaction to Paul’s death, he gets the band together, George and Ringo, to investigate what happened that night. It gets a bit Scooby Doo as they search Paul’s house and mysteries get solved quickly and neatly. In the desire for a rounded, circular plot, for answers, Baron and Carbonetti force themselves away from their initial, remarkable tone and into something a little less interesting to me. The space on the page becomes less confined, the characters come out of the shadows and loom large in the panels. 

Death is an ambiguous thing, it’s messy and doesn’t leave answers. If you’re having a bad trip, the world becomes uncertain and messy, you lose your footing. As “Paul is Dead” progresses, it regains its footing too easily. By the end, we can stand tall and comfortably, it was all a fun romp. Are there lingering effects of the trip? It doesn’t seem so. 

In making the second half of the book more story shaped, Baron & Carbonetti undermine the impact of the opening. The art style is full of disquiet and uncertainty and in the wild grief that “Paul is Dead” starts with, it all works perfectly. But it can’t commit to ambiguity and ultimately spoils something that was otherwise would’ve been great. I’m not sure if you sustain the opening approach for a whole graphic novel, maybe you need some more proper plot than that. But what we’re left with is a book that has a lot of interesting, gorgeous stuff in it but doesn’t do much with that.


//TAGS | Original Graphic Novel

Edward Haynes

Edward Haynes is a writer of comics, fiction, and criticism. Their writing has been featured in Ellipsis, Multiversity, Bido Lito!, and PanelxPanel. They created the comic Drift with Martyn Lorbiecki. They live in Liverpool, where they hornily tweet for your likes and RTs @teddyhaynes

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