The potential danger from a story like this is that the author can be too close to the subject. This not leads to an inherent bias in the storytelling, but it also runs the risk of only being interesting as a point of family lore. Just because your family thinks that wacky story about Uncle Albert is entertaining, that doesn't necessarily mean anyone else will think the same thing. And if you go so far as to include yourself in the story -- the challenges you had in crafting the account of it and such -- then you also layer on the risk of making the whole piece pretentious and self-absorbed.
The book opens with "My grandfather was no ordinary man. He led an extraordinary life." It's a relatively bold claim to start with, and it does suggest we've got a seriously biased author here. However, we do soon see things start getting very challenging for Marx when he loses his mother when he's only ten years old. His father was labeled an enemy of the state and killed a few years later. The story weaves in and out of Marx relaying his stories to Onrie, and the events themselves transpiring. Much like an oral telling, too, it's not entirely linear, though Onrie has no doubt straightened things out considerably. Readers do get the sense the story is being told to them in a conversation, and not so much a formally crafted narrative. But we learned about Marx surviving (barely) the front lines against the Nazis as well as some years in prison, being classified as an enemy of the state mostly on the grounds that his father was considered one.
What the story does well, I think, is that it's not just a relaying of what happened. But the basic narrative serves as an exploration of what made Marx who he was as a child and a young man, and how that gets reflected in his a life as an old/dying man. I think that's where a lot of generational conflict comes from; without the context of someone's life and all they've experienced, their actions and characteristics of today might not make sense. And frankly, even with that context, trying to peer through those foundations can be difficult even for a person who has that context. But it's only when you're able to piece together those elements, and (somewhat) objectively frame their actions with that does their rationale begin to make sense.
By the time you get to the end of the story, the "extraordinary life" claim from the front checks out. Marx did have to go above beyond "ordinary" for much of his life. Which makes the post-WWII summary that's presented as a prose coda all the more incredible! There's enough on that one page for an entire other book! I don't know if that will be coming or not, but I'll definitely back it if it shows up on Kickstarter at any point!
Though I haven't mentioned the artists, I thought Nick Bell, Vassilis Gogtzilas, and Dan Dougherty all did fantastic work. I did manage to secure one of Dougherty's original pages, and it really is superb even on close inspection. The changing artists does occasionally make identifying characters from one chapter to the next a little challeneging just by virtue of their diffrerent artistic styles, but Kopman seems pretty quick to make sure the textual content helps to parse that out in short order. And since it's only between chapters anyway, it's not a frequent or ongoing issue.
You can buy the book from Kopman's online shop for $14.95 if you missed the Kickstarter, and I expect he'll have copies at any conventions he tables at.
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