Bluffton (2013)

Welcome to Buster Monday book club – I’ve read a few Buster-related books, and each is valuable in its own way.  Each is peppered with wonderful humor, each brings its own slant to the table, and most of all, each is an utter labor of love.  This beautifully-illustrated take on Buster’s boyhood is a delight, and it seems fitting to write about it in the first week of summer.

I don’t know if I’d go so far as to say this is a graphic novel, but at more than 200 pages, we’re definitely beyond picture books.  Either way, the book, written and illustrated by Matt Phelan, has a youthful bent.  It mines all of the best young-Buster anecdotes and introduces them to its readers – and its invented protagonist, Henry – on the shores of Muskegon Lake, where the Keatons and a number of other vaudeville families would summer in the off-season.

Henry has been quietly subsisting in the sleepy Michigan town, dreary days that bleed into one another.  In 1908, however, the nearby neighborhood of Bluffton is set upon by vaudevillians, showbiz nomads who live boarding house to boarding house and don’t have anywhere to wile away their holiday months.  In a flash, Bluffton houses are snatched up by hoofers, jugglers, and tumblers, an Actors’ Colony clubhouse is christened, and the joyous, irreverent atmosphere of the stage come to Muskegon.  They’ve brought their music, their jokes, their routines, their attitude, and their elephants along with them, and Henry is fascinated by a world he’s never seen before.

Along with them comes 13-year-old Buster Keaton:  the human mop, the pintsized stone face, and the star of the Three Keatons.  Henry is immediately drawn to the young vaudeville star’s whirlwind life.  He lives for the exciting and outrageous stories of Buster’s career – the family act, the backstage mishaps, and the attempts to keep the Gerry Society from pinning them with child labor charges.  For Buster’s part, his summers in Bluffton the only times he gets to be a kid with a house, a gaggle of neighborhood friends, and days stretching endlessly before him, so many of the stories are told by his Actors’ Colony friends.  He doesn’t dwell on his fame or his stage experience.  Of course, he can’t help tumbling and satirizing everywhere he goes – Buster will be Buster – but he doesn’t approach quaint little Bluffton as some podunk town he’s stuck in until he can get back to performing.  Instead, he attacks his days, playing and joking and pranking (oh, the pranking!) like he’s trying to fit as much summer as he can into every single hour.

The illustrations are lovely, soft colors and simple, uncluttered backdrops.  It’s a nice medium for a book like this, because the visual aspect lets it focus on the motion, which is obviously a major consideration where Buster’s concerned.  Entire pages go by without dialogue, just panel after panel of Buster flipping and flying through the air because that’s simply what he does.  His assorted handmade contraptions, like the collapsing outhouse, are similarly well-rendered.  If I have one gripe with the illustrations, it’s with the likeness of Buster himself, specifically his eyes.  I know the eyes for all the characters are pretty deemphasized – Henry, by and large, gets by with just two black dots – but Buster’s enormous, heavy-lidded eyes are such a prominent feature of his iconic face, and it seems weird not to depict them.