You’d think comic books and pro wrestling would be a natural fit. They share a lot in common. Ridiculous violence. Larger-than-life musculatures. Melodramatic storylines that build to a big blow off. Stilted dialogue.

That the two seem to be a natural fit has occurred to a lot of folks over the years. C.M. Punk adopted Ben Grimm’s fifty-plus year catch phrase “It’s Clobberin’ Time!” as his own. Christopher Daniels and Kazarian got letters printed in a Spiderman book a few months ago. Hell, Raven co-wrote a Spiderman book years ago. There’s a PWTorch VIPer who writes Star Trek and Doctor Who comics for IDW publishing – Scott Tipton.

Chikara tried to tap into the dual market, and simultaneously hold up the indy tradition a few years back of producing DVD covers where a reasonable person would have no idea what the DVD was about, by creating cool tributes to famous comic book covers. Jerry Lawler, a longtime Frank Frazetta fan who broke into wrestling with his comic art depictions of Memphis wrestling stars like Jackie Fargo and Lance Russell, did covers for Headlocked, a fictional series about pro wrestling, and the afterword for a recent major Frazetta coffee-table book retrospective. Mick Foley collaborated with the great artist Jill Thompson on one of his children’s books.

On the other side, Marvel did a pretty crappy WCW comic book for a while there, one that they clearly had difficulty getting decent artists and writers to produce. There was a forgettable Undertaker horror book that lasted a few issues. And who could forget new WWE Hall of Famer The Ultimate Warrior’s book?

Holy Moley! Horrible art ripping off Rob Liefeld (and Rob Liefeld was the worst big-time comic book artist of the last twenty-five years) and Warrior philosophizin’ and inspirin’ the Little Warriors with a half-assed religion he made up by himself called Destrucity was, like, the exact opposite of what Will Eisner had in mind. There was yet another WWE eyesore a little while ago where the artists, whoever they were, tried to outdo the Warrior in the ridiculous muscle department with every single character.

With the exception of Antonio Rocca’s long-ago cameo in a Superman book, Los Bros Hernandez’s shoot strips on Adrian Adonis and the like, and honestly, Mick Foley’s new WWE series, which isn’t bad at all and probably as close as any WWE product ever produced to depict what it is WWE would really like to be doing with its Superstars (hint – no ring), most of the direct tie-ins between the two similar genres have been uniformly terrible.

“Andre The Giant – Life and Legend,” the new graphic art biography from First Second Books by Ignatz Award winning indy cartoonist Box Brown, transcends all that, probably because it eschews all those supposed commonalities. Brown’s spare style, one that owes much more to Chester Brown than Jack Kirby, taps into the loneliness that was at the heart of Andre’s life, the isolation that he felt because the very thing that made him rich and famous was, in the end, killing him. Brown doesn’t draw an extra inch in the entire book. Every panel, every line, scrupulously serves Andre’s story.

It’s the nature of graphic art biographies that the content has to be picked carefully, in a decompressed style. Brown picks the right thumbnail stories that get to Andre’s essence – the upbringing, his legendary drinking life, the sex, the promoters and their manipulations (it’s cool to see his subtle characterizations of the famous wrestling figures that surrounded the Giant), The Princess Bride (but no Six Million Dollar Man), the sad relationship with his daughter, what happened when fans and big-time wrestlers alike tried him on, and the tragedy of the acromegaly that slowly robbed him of life.

Brown gets how Andre The Giant’s world-touring gimmick worked, and why it worked so well.

It’s only when Brown gets to Wrestlemania III and his huge money match with Hulk Hogan that he serves the hype more than the legend, and that choice serves the art, and allows Andre’s subsequent quick decline to stand in sad conquest.

“Andre The Giant: Life and Legend” deserves a place on the bookshelf of the best of pro wrestling biographies, and an equal place in any serious comic book reader’s collection.

(Bruce Mitchell has been a PWTorch columnist since 1990. He hosts the PWTorch Livecast every Monday night in the hour before Raw with Travis Bryant at www.PWTorchLivecast.com. The weekly two-hour Bruce Mitchell Audio Show with host Wade Keller is a VIP audio staple for years. His column archives dating back to 1990 are available in the Bruce Mitchell Library at the PWTorch VIP website. On the March 16 episode of the Bruce Mitchell Audio Show, he talked in-depth about why Carlos Colon being inducted into the WWE Hall of Fame is a disgrace based on how he handled the murder of Bruiser Brody in his company in 1987.)

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