Mark Twain's Autobiography 1910-2010
We've attempted to push cartoonist Michael Kupperman on you several times before. His ongoing Tales Designed to Thrizzle series produced one of the best - and for my money the funniest - comic book of 2010; I also pimped that book on an early episode of NPR's Pop Culture Happy Hour podcast.
In his just-published Mark Twain's Autobiography: 1910-2010, Kupperman recounts a recent encounter with a very-much-not-dead Samuel Clemens, Bard of Hannibal, who thrust a manuscript into his hand ("Publish this ... under your name, [so] people will be free not to believe a word of it! ... You should decorate it with your silly drawings, to further undermine the credibility. Perhaps a few comical strips as well.")
Kupperman duly obliged. The result, as a physical object, is a book that most resembles those Biographies of Great Americans books that collected dust on the shelves of your third-grade classroom, the ones that only the nerdiest kids (hi!) ever perused, featuring short chapters and frequent full-page illustrations (though Kupperman does present two chapters in comics form).
Any resemblance to those books vanishes quickly, let's note, once you actually start reading the thing.
According to Twain, he never died, "but those same old rumors got exaggerated and then a bunch of other stuff happened...." Other stuff such as being kept alive by a wizard's spell, for example.
Twain says he passed the years immediately following his not-death aimlessly. For a while he pretended to be a ghost: "... I began to enjoy my supposed supernatural status. I was absolved of most of the traditional duties of life, and I delighted in chasing people around the house while moaning, 'whoooooooooooo.'"
A life of two-fisted adventure as an astronaut, adult movie star, spy-smasher and ... really just a LOT of other things, after the jump.
