How cool is this?
Here's a graphic novel on the early life of "Mama" Cass Elliot, by Pénélope Bagieu. She's a prolific cartoonist, with her own ongoing series featuring her character Joséphine, as well as the book Exquisite Corpse, published in English by First Second.
In a note within, she mentions that her work is based in large part on Dream a Little Dream of Me: the Life of "Mama" Cass Elliot by Eddi Fiegel. I'll have to dig up a copy of that for myself.
California Dreamin' is in French, but it's a very American story of reinvention. Born Ellen Naomi Cohen, she moves to NYC during the Great Folk Scare.
Speaking of NYC, here's an excerpt of the book's back cover (it's an excerpt because I scanned it poorly).
That brought me up short for a second. Cafe Wha? is on MacDougal, just off Minetta Lane. The Waverly Theater (now the IFC Center) would be on Sixth Avenue, just at the foot of West 3rd. And I think the logo of the theater is a slightly more recent vintage, too...Not that I'm blaming the author for not being particularly 100% accurate: I tried to meet Robert Leighton at the IFC to see the Lampoon documentary Drunk Stoned Brilliant Dead, and I sent the poor guy to the location of the old 8th Street Playhouse, because I am an old hippie trying to rely on his fading memories, and what this world could easily use is a Google Street View with a time machine switch that would show New York at various times in the past. Like the Great Folk Scare, for example.
The book is wonderful and very evocative of the period. Somebody needs to publish this in English so that I can stop plugging it into Google Translate.
What did I do before Google, anyhow?
