Nick Cave has made a career, a life really, out of unique storytelling and living as libertine an existence as possible. Over the years his prodigious output of dark, sensual music and stories that seek to extricate the human soul from the mundanity of typical existence matched with Cave’s equally prodigious thirst for women and drugs to create a myth as large as the man. As such, art dedicated to explaining or seeking to understand Cave has been as unique as the man himself: 20,000 Days On Earth blurred the lines of documentary and drama; One More Time With Feeling documented Cave during some of his darkest hours of unspeakable grief after the death of his child. Now, celebrated graphic novelist Reinhard Kleist seeks to add another uniquely intriguing entry to the Cave biographical cannon with Nick Cave: Mercy On Me.

Much like 20,000 Days On Earth, Nick Cave: Mercy On Me will blend truth and fiction as it employs a cast of characters from Cave’s songs and novels to tell the story of the infamous artist’s Australian childhood and then follows him through his years fronting The Birthday Party to the beginning of his successes with the Bad Seeds. Kleist has previously penned celebrated graphic novels about Elvis and Johnny Cash, and specializes in the telling of unique biographical stories, so this project should be a doozy.

Cave certainly seems to approve, read his statement about the project below, and be sure check a brief teaser trailer and some pages from the forthcoming book, which you can pre-order right here and will be released September 7th.

“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