Dave Schaafsma's Reviews > Johnny Appleseed: Green Dreamer of the American Frontier

A comics biography by scholar about John Chapman, a nineteenth-century icon more familiarly known as Johnny Appleseed. Hundreds of children's books memorialized him throughout the twentieth-century and who knows whether he is still known to kids today. But this is not a book for kids, it's a biography of Chapman that I bought because I am a fan of Noah Van Sciver, who illustrated the book. And maybe, too, because the blurb makes it clear it his story provides a kind of alternative model to the violent tale of westward expansion that whites actually took place. And because Johnny Appleseed (JA) was part of a nineteenth-century environmental movement about living in harmony with nature.

JA was known for spreading (and selling) appleseeds everywhere as he walked steadily west. He was also a pacifist, an advocate for non-violence, for living in harmony with Native Americans. Too much time in this book perhaps is spent on his associations with religions such as Swedenborgianism, spiritualism, and beliefs that were common in the nineteenth century and influenced folks such as Emerson and Thoreau and Whitman. JA himself influenced a lot of these folks, including early environmentalist John Muir, and as Buhle makes maybe too tediously clear, everyone from the Beats to hippies to the even contemporary environmentalists. And road advocates like Kerouac, or walking/wandering advocates.

The book is not really a comics biography but more of an illustrated biography with too many words and too many ideas, could have been more focused, but for the reasons above I still enjoyed parts of it quite a bit.