Just a few words to praise Guy Delisle’s brilliant graphic novel MUYBRIDGE. It’s beautifully told, surprising, suspenseful, entertaining; and I learned so much about early photography and time-motion studies, how a sewing machine inspired the threading of celluloid, Louis Lumière work on emulsions (he used potato starch), Reynaud and his projections, Leland Stanford who founded the university that bears his name, praxinoscopes, kinetoscopes, zootroopes, zoopraxiscopes, etc. This also has the melodramatic elements one associates with the art of the period: robber barons, fortunes made and lost, inventions stolen, immigration and even murder (Muybridge was tried for killing his young wife’s lover). All of this is beautifully illustrated and not only with the wonderful drawings, but also with photographs, many of the most famous ones by Muybridge, reproductions of paintings, colour is brought in expressively; there’s a biographical element in that Muybridge’s work is still the basis for animation studies and that’s how the author first learned about the subject; and Guy Delisle even offers us graphic footnotes in a graphic novel. It’s marvellous. The book also makes excellent arguments on crediting Muybridge with the foundation of cinema through his time/motion photography but also for the basis of animation, Claymation in particular, more modern techniques such as the bullet time we see in THE MATRIX and much more. I can’t wait for my young nephews to get a bit older to gift them this and I can also imagine teachers of the subject using some of the images/captions for teaching: it makes the obscure Greek designations to some of the devices so easily legible. In other words, a marvellous book.

José Arroyo