I first came across Jessie Hartland in her biography of Julia Childs, Bon Apetit!, which I will read and review later on this year. I loved it and so was delighted to see the biography of Steve Jobs in the graphic novel section of the library. It’s not a big section and has mostly Manga which I am not really into but this book did pop up.

I know a little bit about Steve Jobs – Apple and the fact that he died of pancreatic cancer but I couldn’t have given you any detail – well now I can. Told in black and white, an interesting choice for a man who liked colour on his products, Hartland has shown his progress from birth to death with plenty of relevant detail in between. Yes, it is for children, but I find that doesn’t matter as I am used to reading children’s literature and getting lots out of it. Jobs was a difficult person to work for, his sense of abandonment defined elements of his life but he was also a genius and his sense of ‘we’ve got to get this right’ drove the company and the innovative products. I didn’t know he was behind Pixar and I also didn’t know that Pixar and Disney worked together on some of the really big animations.

The font throughout the book looks hand written, like a crayon or pencil where the stroke does not put ink or graphite down consistently and the writing is not in straight lines and so whizzes about the page with an energy matched only by Steve Jobs himself. All the pictures are framed from whole pages down to 5 or 6 frames on some pages but there is no trouble with deciding which bit to read next: it flows well.

The decades are marked by pages showing what is new in the world of technology during the 1970s for instance: home calculators, push buttons on telephones and colour TVs with remote controls. (I still had a black and white portable TV until the late 1980s – hardly at the forefront of technology myself.)

There’s an interesting interview here with photos of the book and the ways in which Hartland works with rough drafts and I loved the message that she sent with the finished book.