Bluffton: My Summers with Buster

This fictional story about the young Buster Keaton, told by a childhood friend named Henry, depicts the entertainer as a bright, charismatic, mischievous, troubling, and ultimately inscrutable boy. Matt Phelan’s lush illustrations are vivid, lambent, playful, and evoke the narrator’s nostalgia for a time—and a friendship—long past. The tale is full of interesting facts about vaudeville, and portrays a community that is talented, fun, precarious, and sometimes self-destructive: everything that Henry’s conservative town isn’t. Readers will relate to the honest depiction of Keaton and Henry’s complicated friendship, one fraught with admiration, excitement, and jealousy.

This graphic novel tells the fictionalized story of Buster Keaton’s boyhood summertime stays in Bluffton, Michigan, with the Actor’s Colony. Even if today’s kids don’t recognize Keaton, they will still enjoy the story of protagonist Henry, whose summers are immensely enlivened by the annual visit of the vaudevillians, including a boy his age named Buster. Son of the town storekeeper, Henry is enchanted by the stories the acting folks tell and the tricks they do, and he begins to dream of joining the show. In delicate watercolor illustrations, Phelan uses warm yellows and greens to highlight the happiness of summer, when the actors are in residence. During the off-season, when the actors are gone, the panels are bleaker, gray and sepia-toned, reflecting Henry’s longing for the life Buster brings: “Buster hardly ever stopped. It was like he was trying to smush a whole summer into every single day.” Phelan, whose appended author’s note indicates he is a lifelong Keaton fan, carefully balances the joy of his subject’s outrageous pranks (rigging the walls of an outhouse to suddenly come apart, surprising its occupant) with poignancy, including the agonized expressions on Buster’s face when his drunk father berates him. The fictional elements weave seamlessly together with the historical ones for a look into the past that will surely win Buster Keaton some twenty-first-century fans. susan dove lempke