Freddie & Me

As I mentioned when discussing my birthday this year, my buddy Dave gave me this neat autobiographical graphic novel called Freddie & Me, and despite being way behind on the Bret Hart autobiography he gave me for Christmas, I decided to sit down with this one and check it out. Fortunately, Freddie & Me read much faster than Bret Hart's book, so now I can get back to that!

The graphic novel follows the author Mike Dawson's near-fanatical obsession with the band Queen and their lead singer Freddie Mercury throughout the bulk of his (the author's) life, essentially basing the entire autobiography around his Queen-related memories. The Amazon review quickly sums up the book's possible shortcomings as such:

"It's usually wise for a memoirist to have either an intrinsically interesting life or unusual sensitivity to the meaning of personal experiences. Dawson, unfortunately, has neither...and he barely explains why [Queen] means so much to him, other than that they rock."

I couldn't agree more with this assessment, but that didn't keep me from liking the book a lot. First off, I'm a pretty big Freddie Mercury/Queen fan myself (which of course is largely why Dave bought it for me), but even beyond this, the artwork, stories, and attempts at tying Queen lyrics to the author's life are all charming, and there are a couple things about the book that really stand out. Namely, the recurring asides the author has concerning his imaginings of what was going on with his sister's favorite singer (and therefore his musical antithesis) George Michael and a neat little interlude chapter concerning the nature of memory (which is relevant in that the whole book is obviously a collection of often hazy memories).

So, although the author might not have had a whole lot to say about the nature of life, nor did he lead a particularly interesting one himself, I highly enjoyed reading the book and would certainly recommend it to anyone who can relate to his youthful sort of whole-hearted obsession with a musician/group. Good stuff. =)