Musician, novelist, poet, actor: Nick Cave is a Renaissance man. His wide-ranging artistic output, always uncompromising, hypnotic and intense, is defined by an extraordinary gift for storytelling.
Employing a cast of characters drawn from Cave's music and writing, Reinhard Kleist's graphic novel, Nick Cave: Mercy On Me, paints an expressive and enthralling portrait of a formidable artist and influencer. Kleist captures Cave's childhood in Australia; his early years fronting The Birthday Party; the sublime highs of his success with The Bad Seeds; and the struggles he encountered along the way to self-expression. Nick Cave: Mercy on Me, like Cave's songs, is by turns electrifying, sentimental, morbid and comic, but always engrossing.
Buy the book | Buy the eBook | Look inside | Watch the trailer
Reinhard Kleist
Reinhard Kleist, born in 1970 in Hürth, Cologne, has worked and lived as an illustrator and comic book artist in Berlin since 1996. He made his international breakthrough in 2006 with the biographical comic book Johnny Cash: I See a Darkness, which was awarded the renowned Max and Moritz Prize and nominated for both the Eisner and Harvey Awards. With The Boxer in 2013, Kleist became the first cartoonist to receive the German Youth Literature Prize. In 2017, Kleist once again tackled one of music’s great storytellers in Nick Cave: Mercy on Me, which was simultaneously released in many languages. In 2018, Kleist was honoured for his work with the Max and Moritz Prize for Best German-Language Comic Book Artist. In 2021, Kleist tackled another extraordinary boxing champion, Emile Griffith, in the comic book Knock Out! His critically acclaimed graphic biography of David Bowie forms two parts: Starman: Bowie’s Stardust Years (SelfMadeHero, 2023) and LOW: Bowie’s Berlin Years (SelfMadeHero, 2025).
Reviews
"Reinhard Kleist, master graphic novelist and myth-maker has – yet again – blown apart the conventions of the graphic novel by concocting a terrifying conflation of Cave songs, biographical half-truths and complete fabulations and creating a complex, chilling and completely bizarre journey into Cave World. Closer to the truth than any biography, that's for sure! But for the record, I never killed Elisa Day."
— Nick Cave
"Among many highlights are a full-page portrait of the teenage Nick sullenly determined to escape bourgeois conformity, and a superb evocation of the shock-haired exile typing his gothic novel in a Berlin garret just big enough to accommodate his wasted body, piles of papers, some booze and a gun. Kleist does equal justice to the older Cave – thin-haired, wrinkle-browed and strangely dignified."
— The Guardian