The new Comixology Original Nikola Tesla tells the story of a man ahead of his time. Highlighting Tesla’s many innovations and designs, this biography from Giovanni Scarduelli and Sergio Rossi also outlines his failures, battles with fellow inventors, and eventual fall from grace.
Nikola Tesla
Giulia Gabrielli (Letters), Lucy Lenzi (Translator), Giovanni Scarduelli (Artist), Sergio Rossi (Writer)
Comixology Originals and Becco Giallo
March 28, 2023
Nikola Tesla is the third of the Comixology Originals biographies from BeccoGiallo I’ve been reviewing. It’s been interesting reading these as a series. Every creative team has its own take on revisiting and retelling history. But I’m not sure anyone’s quite got the right mix of storytelling format and art yet, though.
The narrative framing of Nikola Tesla was rather unexpected—two men working on a show about Tesla share what they know about the man. One has written a book about Tesla, while the other is open to learning more than he already does.
The bulk of the conversation in Nikola Tesla takes place during a road trip—the unnamed men are on a Tesla-related mission. This central conceit felt contrived to me. It’s bad enough that it’s hard to figure out who’s asking the questions and who’s answering in the early panels, which focus on the scenery rather than the speakers. But some of their questions appear to be little more than forced exposition. Why would either of them be surprised to learn that Tesla worked for Edison when they both have some amount of knowledge about him?
I do wish the two characters had names—I can’t figure out why they don’t. It’s such an odd choice because the lack of names created a distance between them and the reader. Was that the intention? To keep the focus solely on Tesla?
Not directly related to the missing names, but I also couldn’t get a handle on the voice of the characters. Their speech patterns were too similar to one another to distinguish them, and because neither had any backstory, let alone purpose, barring being narrators, I couldn’t get a sense of what they sounded like. Despite their journey being based in Manhattan, their speech patterns felt non-American. If that were the case, wouldn’t it have been interesting to lean into the narrators being immigrants, seeing as Tesla was an immigrant himself?
I did like the interludes when the characters tried to decide what should be kept in and left out of their show—such as the video of Edison electrocuting an elephant—or when they remind each other to double-check some facts.
But most of those facts are common knowledge, and at times, I felt like I was revisiting Tesla’s appearances in Doctor Who or Murdoch Mysteries. Worse, Nikola Tesla often reads like a conversational version of Tesla’s Wikipedia page.
The only point where I felt like there was a hint of who Tesla was was when one of the characters talks about Tesla’s obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD). But here, too, the book does something very uncomfortable—the characters call Tesla’s behaviour “craziness”. Yet, not once is the term OCD mentioned, nor even the words “mental illness.” Ugh, how is anyone publishing this in 2023? What were the editors thinking? Why didn’t the writers do a bit of research and get sensitivity readers? I’m seething.
There’s also a biography attached at the end that repeats pretty much everything in Nikola Tesla, the comic. What was the point of this? It felt like the inclusion of the biography negated the very need for the comic book.
I’m of two minds about the art of Nikola Tesla, and I wish I didn’t have to be. The pencil shading black and white style suits the story, though I don’t like the idea of biographies only being in black and white because that’s what most depictions of the past look like. On the one hand, there are some exquisite details—Edison’s power plant, a movie poster, a single slice of pie on a plate. But the two protagonists have barely any definition in their faces, nor are they given the level of detail as the recreations of pictures of Tesla, Edison, Einstein, and others. The inconsistency kept taking me out of the story. I wish artist Giovanni Scarduelli had chosen a lane and stuck to it.
Comics are an intriguing format for sharing biographies—and generally, I like the concept. But should the creators tell the story of a person’s life as they lived it? Neat and chronological? Or take some creative license with it? The books I’ve read so far have tried a bit of both, and I’m just not sure that either lane, or mixing them, works. Nikola Tesla goes with the chronological, factual style but fails to add nuance to what many people can learn about Tesla from watching a 10-minute YouTube video. I wish this book had aimed higher for someone who’s left such a mark on our technology.
