The woman with Fifty Faces by Zackary J. Pinson and Jonathan Lackman is not a bad comic, but it’s a failed one. Its subject matter is fascinating, as film stars transformed models into over 50 of the most important artists of the early 20th century. The craft is particularly the grotesque call of illustrator Pinson and the grotesque call when Rani painted his presentations in several styles that were immortalized. However, for Pinson and Luckman to do well, their work is undermined by a combination of creative missteps and a lack of information about Rani’s life. A woman with 50 faces aims to bring depth and dimension to someone who has been in history for a long time, in order to become the first face of the 50, so to speak. With wide strokes, you will succeed. However, the details blur the point of alienation.
To quote Luckman’s 2014 article “The Mystery of Maria Lani”, he paraphrases all women with 50 faces.
When Maria Lani arrived in Paris in the spring of 1928, she was quickly upset and convinced the fashion mavens and many of the city’s most advanced artists to support the Dreaming Project in order to create a new film, a self-proclaimed silent film star in Berlin. Ten and a half years later, Thomas Mann co-authored a script inspired by her. Jean Renoir agreed that Garvo would direct the star.
By then, Rani had disappeared. When she died in obscurity in 1954, a new story emerged that she was not an actress, not a scam, but a Prague stenographer, a stenographer who fled to America with portraits she owned and then unsold.
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Luckman has been studying Rani for over a decade and concluded that, according to “The Mystery of Maria Lani”, “Maria Lani, the Criminal, the Art Thief” is as Fabric as “Maria Lani, the acclaimed German film star.” Similarly, Brian Moynahan from Vanity Fair wrote in a 2018 article, “Mariarani was the Modernist Masters Muse.”
Maria Rani in real life is certainly elusive and memorable. Occasionally she appears in magazine articles and exhibitions. But one thing is for sure. There are paintings (58 of them, 58 of them, considering that some artists have painted her several times), dozens of photographs and half a dozen sculptures. They hang in great museums and sometimes appear at auctions. They are real.
Abramowicz (Maria’s husband, Maximilian Abramowicz) and Lani did not have any golden artwork.
Luckman and Pingson present a woman with 50 faces as the concept of post-mortem rumors that has long defined Rani. “The Truth,” writes Lachman in the final line of his introduction to the comic, comparing it to Tulpa in “The Criminal and the Art Thief.”
What Lani and Pinson learn about Lani and what they have in the comics are incredibly interesting and clearly human than rumors. But as a work of story and sequential art, the 50-faced woman fights by the distance imposed by limited surviving information about Rani and the decision that Pingson and Raniman will lean towards that distance while Rani is the subject.
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The writings of people who knew Rani, especially her husband Abramowich and her former worshipper and promoter Jean Cocteau, have been widely cited in the comics, and Rani’s writings do not survive. According to a woman with 50 faces, it is confirmed that her writing is an excerpt from an unfinished or lost memoir, remembering to sit in search of a portrait of Jules Paskin. 71 years after her death, Rani is a mystery. According to Lackman, the same thing was true in life, even those closest to her. Of Abramowich, he writes, “until his own death… Max writes a poem for Maria, but tries to understand a woman who ultimately even escaped her husband.” There is only so much that a woman with 50 faces can explore it, as many of Rani’s perspectives are unknown.
Pinson and Luckman receive unanswered questions from Rani’s life and try to build them up into the art and theme of the comic. Her face is not entirely visible as Pinson’s Recreation of the Art Lani is modeled. Certainly, faceless personality becomes a central part of a woman with 50 facial visual language. In some of its most powerful sequences – Rani, who dealt with anti-Semitistic violence, first repeatedly fled as Polish children and young adults, and when she and Abramowitz fled to the United States in 1941, Pinson stripped the details from the prejudices of murder, leaving only hated moans and snars. It is an elegant and nightmare way to capture both the way prejudice poisons the soul and the way prejudice poeticizes both the anonymity that actively enforces that bias given to protect the perpetrator.
However, when the vicious “repeated facelessness is a skillful use of sequential art, Lani’s facelessness is annoyed. She is already a mystery, as she is already so little of her writing, and because the extensions of her life have been spent on relatively obscurity. Eliminating her further does not add constructively to that mystery. It places a barrier between the audience and the comic’s ostensible protagonist. What’s more, Pinson’s artwork is impressive, but whether beautiful and terrifying, its heavy stylishization covers one of the women with the main interests of 50 faces. Pinson’s interpretation of Lani is conversed with existing interpretations of his fellow artists. As her traits become consistently obscure and the comic constantly emphasizes what she doesn’t know, the conversation feels like it lacks important context.
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Certainly, women with 50 faces always feel like they lack the essentials. The portraits Lackman and Pinson paint in the comics are, as promised, full and better than the unbroken caricatures of “Maria Lani, Con Woman and Thief,” but many of Lani’s success remains unknown to her as the main character. It may be impossible to be more specific as there is little information about Rani, especially from her own. As a result, the resulting comics are never clicked at all as character studies of Rani, Abramowitz and artists who lack in panel time. Focusing on Pinson and Luckman’s initial conversation about making cartoons, the short epilogue gives an appetizing glimpse into another path based on a concrete perspective.
Women with the subject of Fifty Faces are intriguing (and the difference between how people are perceived and made for great comics over the years). That comic craft is impressive, but the limited combination of information and narrative choices created in presenting it means that they are ultimately not coming together. It’s a shame.
“The Fifty Faces Women” unfortunately offers most of the behind the mask
Woman with 50 faces
Women with the subject of Fifty Faces are intriguing (and the difference between how people are perceived and made for great comics over the years). That comic craft is impressive, but the limited combination of information and narrative choices created in presenting it means that they are ultimately not coming together. It’s a shame.
Maria Rani leads an attractive life and it is interesting to see the details of her life.
Zackary J. Pinson’s artwork is impressive, and some of the styling has had a huge impact.
It’s simply not enough about Rani’s life. She remains a cipher throughout the comic, and while it is intentional, cipher is a cipher.
Pinson’s stylisation undoubtedly places the comic’s interest in the many ways the artists who made Rani immortal have portrayed her.
For all of the skills and care of our creative team, the book is never clicked at all.
