(Movie trailer voice) At a time of change… in a new world… there was a man… a bearded man… who wandered the land spreading a message of peace, kindness, love… and apple seeds. A legendary man some called JC… probably. John Chapman was – Johnny Appleseed! And he had a boring life!
I’m not sure how I’m tangentially aware of the American folk hero Johnny Appleseed but I suspect the answer is, like with most things in my brain, because of The Simpsons. I didn’t realise how little there was to his story though!
I mainly got it for the Noah van Sciver art – I’m a big fan of Noah’s comics - and tried to use that to trick my brain into thinking I was reading one of his comics but it was no good. Paul Buhle writes like the scholar he is: dryly. Not that he has the material to work with in the first place!
Unlike Paul Bunyan, John Henry and Abraham Lincoln, John Chapman was a real person. He liked wandering about planting apple trees and generally behaving like the proto-hippie he was. He also got into a religion called Swedenborgianism. Still awake? Well, that was it anyhoo.
There’s so little to Appleboy’s story that Buhle has to resort to lengthy digressions on kinda similar subjects in order to beef up the page count. So there’s filler on early settlers who went native with the injuns; people’s perceptions of the American frontier; the many uses of apples and the symbolism of the apple through the ages; who Swedenborg was and what his religion was all about; spiritualism; mini bios on Lincoln and John Muir; and Johnny Appleseed’s lasting legacy that supposedly influenced the likes of Woody Guthrie and Jack Kerouac.
And almost none of it is interesting! I enjoyed Noah’s art as always and I guess it’s an informative read but I found Johnny Appleseed to be one helluva dull comic.
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