Like most adult professional wrestling fans, I was once a lapsed professional wrestling fan. What drew me in at six-years-old didn’t work at 36. I needed an ‘adult’ way to get back in. A graphic novel got me back in*. 

Box Brown’s 2014 graphic novel Andre the Giant: Life and Legend is a New York Times bestselling book painted a picture of Andre in a beautiful and sympathetic light. It’s difficult to imagine the 2018 HBO Andre doc or Vice’s Dark Side of the Ring without it. The kid version of me knew very, very little of what the book covers. The adult version of me soaked in it and, for better or worse, helped reignite what most people might consider a shameful guilty pleasure. There’s a connective tissue between perception of pro wrestling and comic books.

“There’s still a stigma surrounding the sport,” according to Brown. “I think it’s maybe come a little bit further than 20 years ago. It’s like comics. As far as we come, there are still articles that come out everyday that start with “WAM! BAM! POW! Comics aren’t just for kids anymore…”

It’s difficult to explain to non-wrestling fans why I love wrestling and it’s difficult to explain to non-graphic novel fans why I love the Andre book. Once again, there’s more connection. “When I meet people I don’t say I’m a comic artist, I just say I’m an artist. I don’t feel like explaining the type of comics that I make or leave the impression that I’m something else.”

I asked Brown what writers inspired his work on the biggest professional wrestler of all time.

Box Brown: Certainly other non-fiction comics, like Maus. When I was developing my style or whatever, autobio was really popular, which is a non-fiction medium. Some of that influenced how I look at non-fiction, from that autobio perspective, where you’re doing the main character of your life. It’s how I approached Andre. I was previously working on some non-fiction stuff about religion called Everything Dies and I was watching shoot interviews. 

In the early 2000s there were all these shoot interviews with pro wrestlers breaking kayfabe. Before that, it never really happened, we never really got frank interviews about behind the scenes stuff. I was watching those obsessively, Bret Hart, a 12-hour Ric Flair interview. I think the Vice show is really just those shoot interviews, the best stories from those interviews extrapolated on. That was the biggest influence I’m conscious on on Andre. Every single person had a story about Andre. 

I had this connection to Andre because I only saw his waining years. He was way out of his prime when I was watching him.  The think that gets promoted the most about Andre in America is the end of his career, when he’s in that black singlet, when he was one of those guys that made it big when as a character when wrestling was big in the 80s. But he had a whole career before that. 

We got to see the autumn of his career but we never got to see the beginning. They (WWF) would allude to it but we would never see it.

It made me appreciate the work Dave Meltzer does. Even if people see him as a controversial figure, he’s just observing. It’s literally the Wrestling Observer, he’s observing pro wrestling and accumulating a history around it that’s not exactly the thing we see on WWE TV. If he wasn’t doing it and some other people like him, there’d be no understanding of pro wrestling in history. You can’t rely on WWE to compile a factual history. They’re always going to have an ulterior motive to everything they’re talking about and promoting. You need someone on the outside who has no ties to the company to neutrally observe it and to create a history surrounding it. 

When I think about the history aspect of the book, I think about Meltzer and taking wrestlers at their word, which you can’t really do. I did some interviews with wrestlers. I talked to Black Jack Mulligan and it didn’t make really any sense and it was almost impossible to decipher. Having other resources to look to was really important. 

The other aspect to the Andre book that isn’t represented by Meltzer is the personal aspect of Andre and how I related to him as someone who feels like an outsider. Talking about those aspects of his life, it makes his story more compelling and it makes him appear more courageous. He was overcoming a disability. That part gets washed away a lot because he’s so big and strong. A lot of that comes from my personal experiences feeling like an outsider. 

There were a lot of people willing to expose an emotional side of themselves you weren’t really seeing in other places, people like Jeffrey Brown was depicting his feelings as they were and books like (James Kochalka’s) American Elf was an influence. There were so many autobio comics being done and a lot of people taking this introspective look into their behavior and feelings. 

Andre the Giant: Life and Legend is available for purchase and at most public libraries. You can read Dave Meltzer everyday on the Wrestling Observer. Jeffrey Brown’s work can be found at his site. Clumsy and AEIOU are good places to start. American Elf is available from Top Shelf.

*The other things that got me back in are Dave Meltzer, the WWE Network and Chris Kelly (this was the halcyon days of 2015 when the WWE Network was $9.99 and a WWE Hall of Famer was just a WWE Hall of Famer and not also POTUS) and The Lapsed Fan. If you’re a fan of Brown’s book, you’ll probably enjoy Metltzer, the WWE Network (now on Peacock!), Chris Kelly’s pro wrestling writing and The Lapsed Fan. 

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