<span class="SFPTagline"> From SCIFIPEDIA </span>

The Crow is a dark and violent graphic novel by a previously unknown artist, which became an international hit when made into a small, independently produced movie which saw the accidental shooting death of the star, Brandon Lee (Bruce Lee’s son) during filming. James O’Barr (b. 1960) was an adopted child who grew up in rough-edged working class neighborhoods of rust belt Detroit. A naturally talented artist, he was also interested in science (and SF), and started college at Wayne State as a premed major. Forced to drop out for financial reasons, he became an auto detailer, but pursued his interest in comics. He read voraciously, including SF, fantasy, sword and sorcery such as Robert E. Howard and Michael Moorcock, and French symbolist poets, and drew a wide variety of SF and sword and sorcery comic stories for independent publishers. After his girlfriend was killed by a drunken driver, he began writing and drawing The Crow. Eric Draven and his girlfriend Shelly are horribly murdered by a gang of drug-dealing inner city thugs, and Draven is brought back to life by a spirit helper in the form of a crow. The story began publication in 1989 in a series of comic books from Caliber Press, an independent company in Detroit, and then moved to Tundra where it was issued in three volumes, the last in 1992. When Tundra merged with Kitchen Sink, the complete book was published, and became the best-selling independently published graphic novel up to that time, helping to secure the place of graphic novels in comic and book stores. O’Barr combined influences from Will Eisner’s Spirit crime stories to Romantic illustrators like Gustave Doré, and his book and the film were embraced by the Goth subculture. In telling his story, O’Barr created a complex narrative, flashing backward and forward following the characters in a manner reminiscent of Eisner’s graphic novel To the Heart of the Storm. Although the charm of Brandon Lee, and his untimely death, were major contributors to the success of the film, the fact that the film preserved O’Barr’s complex narrative and dark and mordant sense of humor were also key. O’Barr has published little since the success of The Crow; his next graphic novel, Gothik, was projected as a 300-page color and black and white opus, but remains incomplete.