OUTLAW PETE

Cartoonist Caruso (Heart Transplant, 2010, etc.) adapts Springsteen’s song about the inescapability of one’s own nature into a picture book.

We meet Pete as a baby in nothing but a diaper and a 10-gallon hat, and within three pages, the enfant terrible has been in jail and robbed a bank (strangely, in that order). In the blink of an eye, he’s 25—and has added murder and horse theft to his resume. But a dream of his own death drives him out West and into domestic bliss…until a bounty hunter arrives to hold Pete accountable for his sins. The text is taken verbatim from Springsteen’s 2009 song of the same name, and the work shares the doomed melancholy of many of the musician’s working-class ballads. However, Pete’s apocryphal origin and lack of clear motivation keep the book from delivering the complex ache of a Springsteen classic like “Highway Patrolman.” Caruso’s mix of cartoon figures and oil-painted, impressionistic backgrounds is enjoyably kinetic (the fleet-footed, bank-robbing baby is a delight), but the pictures’ literal representation—rather than interpretation—of the text feels like a missed opportunity for fuller collaboration. (What, exactly, was the vision of death that so radically changed Pete’s trajectory? Caruso offers only a skull and crossbones.) In the original, music lends layers of emotion, expansion and pacing that are lacking here. However, reading the book in tandem with the song (easy enough to achieve in the age of iTunes) breathes new life into the pages, Springsteen’s vocals illuminate cadences lost in Caruso’s packed and stacked Schoolhouse Rock!–style treatment of the refrain. But while songs can trade in atmospherics and repetition, invoking if not explicating, a picture book demands fuller narrative and richer interplay between words and images; here, there are simply lyrics on the page. 

A handsome, undercooked curio best enjoyed by Springsteen’s devoted—and in conjunction with the source material.