Biographies are an interesting sort of book for someone who reads a lot of fiction (i.e., me; I read a lot of fiction). Fiction crafts characters and builds a world around them, increasing size and depth and population as it goes. Fiction embroiders, weaves, embellishes, and expands.

By contrast, biographies pare down, trim, and contract. Their subject is usually singular and their context, by definition, is narrow. Other people are mentioned and their lives explored only in relation to the main character. The subject’s life is set in context, but that context is manipulated to fit their path and the places they left footprints.

Biographies of artists are further subject to this phenomenon in that they’re often missing the very thing for which history recorded them as noteworthy: the art. (Well, besides shenanigans. Artists as a group are notorious for their shenanigans.)

Sure, there are a few pages of glossy reproductions or photos of artists at work in an insert – or there’s a sexy cover shot of a greatest hit – but beyond that, the reader is asked to process facts about someone who created visual work without visuals. Would you ask someone to put together a building without blueprints? To assemble Ikea furniture without a 50-page booklet? I mean, come on.

All this to say, I really love what Laurence King is doing with their graphic lives of artists series, and their newest book – Hokusai: A Graphic Biography by Giuseppe Lantazi and Francesco Matteuzzi – is no exception.

Artists’ biographies in a graphic/comic format make so much sense. Does it mean adding a fictional element where dialogue in concerned (unless you have letters or speeches or more modern records of what someone said, or footage of how they walked, or photos of how they wore their hair)? Sure. But then again, have you ever read two biographies of the same person that were exactly the same? Yeah, neither have I.

Everyone takes liberties because everyone who writes a biography has an opinion and an agenda. If they didn’t, they wouldn’t bother focusing real hard on one person for an extended period of time. And we usually have at least general historical references for a given period and educated guesses and extrapolation are things that exist.

Regardless of what other formats do or don’t do, using a graphic format to showcase the events of an artist’s life not only allows biographers to include the artist’s work (or at least pictorial references to them in context), it also allows them to utilize the artist’s style or styles to tell the artist’s story, which is both fundamentally, viscerally right and so extremely meta it kind of breaks your brain.

That last part works particularly well in Hokusai because he worked in so many different styles and media throughout his life, from ukiyo-e to book illustration to manga, and on everything from giant rice paper to grains of rice to postcards. The graphic bio’s artist, in turn, had all the room to play with panel number and size, the number of splash pages, and even a sort of interlude page with a more in-depth explanation of a particular historical point. It also gave the opportunity to include scaled back versions of Hokusai’s own work, alongside other events of his life, framing the creation of each with the people, places, and things that were affecting the artist.

Some more modern elements of popular Japanese art are included, as well as characters bursting out of their panels or talking to one another across panel boundaries. I also appreciate that the dialogue in Hokusai is on the minimal side, because even though we may have the impressions others formed of him, we don’t have footage or recordings.

All of that said, there’s a reason I’ve called this a “book pairings” post. In this particular case, it’s because I’ve come to the conclusion that when one is reading a biography of an artist, one should do so with a book of the artist’s work nearby – because art is cool and why would you not want to look at more of it? Also, when someone makes art for a living, the work they produce is fundamental to understanding not only that person but also the society in which they live: what it values, what it fears, what it finds terrifying and hilarious.

Perhaps most important, artists preserve stories in a way that makes them accessible to everyone. Because what are any of us without stories?

Something Wicked from Japan: Ghosts, Demons, & Yokai from Ukiyo-e Masterpieces features woodblock prints by Hokusai and countless other artists working in the medium. It’s a collection of popular art from Edo-era Japan. Whereas the majority of work had previously been commissioned by the royal classes and the gentry, it was in this period that easy-to-reproduce stamped prints priced for the general populace became available. One of the most popular subjects were yokai (demons or demonic creatures) and yokai stories.

Ghostly ladies? Nine-tailed foxes? Skeletons playing Go? Check, check, and check. Having this mythical Japan alongside the historical Japan of Hokusai is both a fascinating juxtaposition and a gorgeous combined ethos. Of course, it’s just a very, very tiny peek at a very large whole – one I would love to explore further. If anyone has suggestions, hit me up.

Hokusai: A Graphic Biography was released by Laurence King on April 6th.

Something Wicked From Japan is out now, but the first English printing sold out in, like, three seconds. PIE International is supposed to do a second run, but there’s no date listed. I ended up buying the Japanese version, which has bilingual titles for all the works and an English version of the introduction. Which, yay, because my beginning Duolingo Japanese only has me as far as eye, ear, bird, and cat.