Death Rap: Tupac Shakur, A Life

Death Rap: Tupac Shakur, A Life tells Tupac’s story as a comic. The script is by Barnaby Legg and Jim McCarthy, the artwork by an illustrator who goes by Flameboy. The writing duo had already turned musicians’ lives into graphic novels, including Godspeed: The Kurt Cobain Graphic and Eminem: In My Skin.

The facts

What it’s about

The graphic novel follows Tupac’s life in chronological order, its contents are organised by year, from his childhood in New York to the fatal shooting in Las Vegas at the age of 25. Much of the space goes to the Death Row Records years under Suge Knight, gang violence in Los Angeles and the road to the disaster of 1996. Visually, the creators go for a dark look borrowed from film noir and crime comics; the publisher talks about “gritty” visuals.

Verdict

A comic-book biography with a dramatising streak, not a reference work. Dialogue and scenes are condensed and re-staged, which keeps the book lively but makes it unreliable as a source of facts. Readers who know the story get an unusual visual take; newcomers should pair it with a proper biography. We could not find reviews in major media.

For German readers it is one of the few titles on this list that was translated. More books: Books. What is known about the night of the shooting: Death.