Comic Book Tattoo: Tales Inspired by Tori Amos

VOYA

Singer/songwriter Tori Amos has been recording and performing her own brand of accessible, poetic alt-pop rock for sixteen years. During that time, she has had close friends in the comics industry. Co-editor and instigator of this collection Hoseley and shaper-of-stories, Sandman creator and author of the introduction Neil Gaiman were chief among them. Hoseley floated the idea of a collection of Amos's songs set to sequential art, and Amos agreed as long as the creators did not produce "comic cover versions" of her songs by interpreting the lyrics too literally. More than eighty artists contributed, some doing double and triple duty, to the many interpretations of Amos's trippy lyrics, from "Little Earthquakes" (1992) to "American Doll Posse" (2007). Each song's lyrics along with art credits accompany the interpretation. Some are wordless pieces of visual art whereas others are full-blown stories, and they range from three to thirteen pages. Every style of art and tone of story makes an appearance. Amos stipulated that the creators would not be censored, and that proviso is apparent in this very adult collection. There are blood, masturbation, blasphemy, violence, and adult situations right alongside Disneyesque toonettes. The volume is fantastic and fantastically diverse, but its audience in the young adult area will be quite small. Fans of the artists or specific songs will find it frustrating that there is no table of contents or index. There is also the necessity of lifting with the knees as the huge tome could cause back and shelf strain even in paperback. Reviewer: Timothy Capehart