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Neil Young Album Morphs Again

Books get adapted to film all the time.  The reverse migration is rare.  Even more unusual is a movie inspired by an album ultimately spawning a book.  But anything involving Neil Young makes expecting the unexpected a good place to start.  Greendale, Young's modestly successful 2003 album about a fictional town and its residents, went on to become a movie that met with similarly subdued appreciation.  But some critics are giving Neil Young's Greendale, a new book based on the album, a much more enthusiastic response than the album or movie managed to collect.  The book, which is being produced by a division of DC Comics, is being described as a graphic novel.  Fantastic graphics saturate the pages, creating a richly visual reading experience as the characters confront issues over war,  the environment and personal responsibility, themes that occupy places in many Neil Young songs.  The choice of artist was critical enough to the project that Young himself recruited Cliff Chiang and refused to take 'no' for an answer.  Having already been advised that Chiang's schedule was too busy for him to take the project on, Young sent a message the artist himself received during half time of the Super Bowl saying he was prepared to delay the book '...until Hell froze over' if necessary to get Chaing.  It took two years for the artist to complete the panels that fill the 160 page book Joshua Dysart had written the story and dialog for based on characters inspied by Young's album.  Dysart had priase for Young's role in the lengthy project, telling the New York Times that the singer was a 'phenomenal collaborator' in bringing what he describes as, '...an American fable with strong supernatural elements.'
NYTimes.com

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