Nick Cave
Musician, novelist, poet, actor: Nick Cave (b. 1957) is a Renaissance man.
His wide-ranging artistic output—always uncompromising, hypnotic, and intense—is defined by an extraordinary gift for storytelling. In Nick Cave: Mercy on Me, Reinhard Kleist employs a cast of characters drawn from Cave’s music and writing to tell the story of a formidable artist and influencer.
Kleist paints an expressive and enthralling portrait of Cave’s childhood in Australia; his early years fronting The Birthday Party; the sublime highs of his success with The Bad Seeds; and the crippling lows of his battle with heroin. Capturing everything from Cave’s frenzied performances in Berlin to the tender moments he spent with love and muse Anita Lane, Kleist’s graphic biography, like Cave’s songs, is by turns electrifying, sentimental, morbid, and comic—but always engrossing.
Reinhard Kleist was born in 1970 near Cologne. After graduating from the School of Graphic Art and Design in Munster, he moved to Berlin, where he has lived and worked as a freelance comics artist and illustrator ever since. Kleist’s books have been translated into many languages and have received several prizes. His graphic novel Johnny Cash: I See A Darkness was nominated for both the Eisner and Harvey awards, as well as receiving the Max und Moritz Prize for the Best German-language Comic. With The Boxer, Kleist became the first cartoonist to receive the German Youth Literature Award. An Olympic Dream was serialised in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung before being published, with some revisions, as a graphic novel.