cover image Steve Jobs: Genius by Design

Steve Jobs: Genius by Design

Jason Quinn and Amit Tayal. Campfire (Random House, dist.), $12.99 trade paper (104p) ISBN 978-93-80028-76-7

Unlike so many of the nation’s great innovative businessmen of the past (Edison, Ford), Steve Jobs’ wall of hagiography was barely left standing by the time of his death. At first, writer Quinn’s slim YA graphic biography of the technological visionary follows in much the same glowing and worshipful light that shone on Jobs during his feted career; one of Taval’s first full-page panels even shows Jobs reclining on a cloud (in heaven?) toying with an iPad. Once Quinn starts grinding through the details of Jobs’s initially scattershot and then almost frighteningly focused life, a darker view emerges that will be familiar to readers of Walter Isaacson’s biography. All of his bruising interpersonal habits (calling everyone in earshot “bozos,” indulging in temper tantrums and manipulative tears at the drop of a hat, abandoning his first child) are here. It’s the story of a snarky rebel who (in Taval’s bright and sketchy style) is always either sneering in disdain or gesticulating in excitement. The final period in Jobs’s life, when he introduced so many of his signature creations, passes quickly, but this is a decent brief sketch of a man whose frequent lack of humanity was almost as jaw-dropping as the intensity of his ambitions. (Sept.)