“A voyeuristic literary and visual pleasure, The Illustrated Wild Boy is a shocking, amusing, and entertaining memoir.
John Du Cane’s memoir The Illustrated Wild Boy contains adventures and anecdotes from a lifetime spent exploring at the fringes of society.
The book’s stories live up to their “wild” billing, with accounts of sexual experiences realized and almost realized, a conversation with a murderer, and excrement served up in patties for dinner, among other subjects. Each story is no more than a page or two long, and they are told in concise, controlled explosions of words chosen for maximum impact.
The book’s pace is unrelenting. As soon as one story ends, the next arrives, like a series of cars poised for hit-and-run collisions. A raw vitality permeates the book, reflecting a try-anything philosophy. Humor is also abundant amid tales of near deaths, real and imagined.
Du Cane, a filmmaker, spiritual seeker, and fitness guru, writes with a distinct and appealing voice, world wise but not world weary. His stories, like one that explains how he came to eat some of his cremated father’s ashes, are memorable, of the sort that can be read aloud to regale an audience. They’re sorted into chapters that provide structure and that are titled to give a hint of what lies in wait. The titles of individual stories, such as “The Angry Dwarf from Horror Hospital,” also inspire curiosity.
A list of encountered notables includes Lou Reed, Mick Jagger, and Andy Warhol, and the stories also cover time spent across the globe. The fearless inclusion of embarrassing details, like a semi-accidental sexual encounter with a drag queen, enhance the rich, funny tales. These extensive, excessive life experiences are filtered through Du Cane’s perspective as a husband and father; the book acknowledges both the nobility and the comedy inherent to human life.
The writing is punchy, muscular, and bracing. Anecdotes begin with first lines that are intriguing and immersive, such as “The Buick Century belched to a stop on red” and “The Americans invented ‘dating’—although they are usually puzzled when I tell them so.” Stories’ final lines are also funny and thoughtful, often ending with tantalizing ellipses to indicate that they might not yet be complete; they are somewhat open to interpretation.
Judit Tondora’s illustrations appear every couple of pages. They utilize bright colors and bold designs. They sometimes consist of quotes from the text in large fonts that play against textured backdrops and collages, showing bits of people or other recognizable elements of the relevant story. More striking are the illustrations that don’t use text at all: a stained-glass-style image of Lou Reed’s death while doing Tai Chi with his wife Laurie Anderson; and a Cubist, Picasso-style likeness of Du Cane. The illustrations show a fascinating variety of creative visual styles, from comic-book-style pictorial storytelling to full-page images that vary to match the tones of their connected stories.”— Foreword Clarion Reviews
“The Illustrated Wild Boy features Judit Tondora’s beautiful color drawings which embellish a literary story collection that captures different memories and experiences,
from a child’s fascination with the power and attraction to setting things on fire to an adult’s experience of color and vivid life during a cocaine experiment, causing him to lose track of years of carefully cultivated spirituality in search of bliss, creating a pattern that results in the reflection “We build beauty. We destroy the beauty. We rebuild the beauty. And so it goes…”
The surprising blends of autobiography, philosophy, spirituality, and cultural investments in wild times, wild feelings, and different forms of horror and growth are wound into a story of media explorations and artistic investments to create a unique graphic novel-style memoir.
Unlike typical graphic stories, this collection blends a healthy degree of literary writings with colorful visual backgrounds. Where graphic productions typically promote brevity over explorations, John Du Cane centers his adventures firmly in written observations that embrace metaphor and reflection with equal depth and insight.
From young and new adult pranks and family legacies to Du Cane’s independent film investments, associations, and productions which fuel riots and political fervor, one lasting legacy of this collection is its unusual ability to juxtapose spirituality, counterculture, and childhood memories.
These back-to-back revelations take readers from the mountains of China, where Du Cane reflects on the pan-fried wasps he enjoyed in a serene and surreal holy mountain atmosphere, to the philosophical insights created by misreading a tee shirt affirming the importance of staying awake in life (as opposed to staying away from it).
Irony, critical observation, artistic expression, counterculture trends, and social and family influences craft a series of thought-provoking, lively, engrossing short works that are not just about Du Cane’s world, but about how readers interpret these visions and revelations.
It’s rare to find a multifaceted short story collection of vignettes whose tales are equally well rooted in artistic, personal, and social observation.
Hungarian illustrator Judit Tondora’s lovely backgrounds bring Du Cane’s adventures to life. The result is a creative and involving work of art, language, and social inspection that will delight readers looking for literary works strong in spiritual and social revelations.” — D. Donovan, Senior Reviewer, Midwest Book Review
“As a writer, Du Cane is concise, resulting in brief stories and an overall succinct memoir. His smooth, frank prose is engaging: “I am at best a poorish windsurfer, with scant skills and not much nautical sense to back it up. So, when the tides and the sudden gusts conspired to strand me far from the rocky shore, I ended up dismasting, lying on the board and paddling.” Accordingly, he neither condemns nor condones his occasional illicit behavior but rather allows his experiences to speak for themselves. For example, as a teenager, he smoked dope with strangers and became violently ill. During his stupor, one man raped him until Du Cane managed to flee, left with a lingering sense of vulnerability.
The illustrations accompanying certain stories are striking and indelible. While some are graphic-novel style, others veer in entirely different directions. In the case of Du Cane’s birth, Tondora’s work is convincingly akin to Japanese erotic art while an image spotlighting Lou Reed resembles stained glass. Perhaps her most superlative effort here is the pastel-shaded, psychedelic rendering of Du Cane’s tale of a staggering, possibly hallucinogenic cocaine episode. The book’s potent design, which packs the pages with collages, often incorporates both the author’s words and Tondora’s pictures, showcasing the solid fusion of the two.
An absorbing memoir perfectly complemented by exquisite art.” — Kirkus Reviews
“The Illustrated Wild Boy is a good read and the visuals are good visuals. I’ve had it for weeks and I like to open it anywhere and read a few pages. There are hundreds of short stories worth telling and worth reading. We can’t all be in a room with John Du Cane and his hushed audience of admirers but this is the next best thing.
I can wholeheartedly agree with the title, Du Cane was a very wild boy and still has that sparkle in his eye. In his opening statement he declares, “If the listener responds to the teller’s tale, he does so out of sympathetic resonance.” In many cases this is true for me, because in my 55 years or so of being an active musician and record producer, I too have traveled far and wide and can relate to some of the jungle stories (real jungles and urban jungles). Like John, I can sit in the company of friends and strangers and tell some quite incredible stories too, but most of John’s stories are experiences I’ve never had. However, he writes about these things so well I can certainly resonate with them.
The book is interspersed with dramatic graphic art by Judit Tondora, who has worked for DC Comics and has illustrated official Star Trek, Captain America, Wonder Woman and Bettie Paige artworks. Her work is excellent, so good that they slow the page turning somewhat.
Some stories have more than a touch of violence, tragedy, murder and near misses, many involving fire. But some have downright charm with some heavy hitters in the Art, Film and Music worlds – Patti Smith, Robert Mapplethorpe and The Rolling Stones (where, inside a vocal booth, Bianca J offered him his first experience of Peruvian Marching Powder). In Max’s Kansas City he was introduced to Jackie (famously described in Lou Reed’s song “Walk On The Wild Side”) who kind of seduced him but…I’ll let John tell you how that episode ends.”—Tony Visconti, producer, David Bowie
