A Vancouver filmmaker who created an award-winning documentary about her vaudeville star great-grandfather has now turned the story into a graphic novel.

Ann Marie Fleming's film The Magical Life of Long Tack Sam was a confection of animation, stills, old clippings and photos about a man no one seemed to have captured on film.

Ann Marie Fleming's graphic novel combines stills from the film and new images she has created herself.
(Penguin)

The 2003 film was named best Asian-Canadian documentary at the 2003 Toronto Reel Asian International Film Festival and went on to play at film festivals across the U.S. and in Asia.

Fleming's graphic novel combines stills from the film and new images she has created herself to tell the story of an international performer who was a headline act in the early 1900s.

"He was an amazing individual," Fleming told CBC Radio's Q cultural affairs show.

"He was born in a small town in China and he ended up being a headliner all over the world on the vaudeville circuit. He did this sort of full-on Chinese acrobatic comic musical routine and he travelled the world with up to 80 performers."

He appealed to both Chinese and Western audiences at a time of political turmoil and xenophobia. He married an Austrian woman.

"There were a lot of Chinese acts at that time, but they all went back to China," Fleming said. "He was able to adapt to a Western sensibility."

Fleming said she once saw one of the magic acts that made her great-grandfather famous — the production of a goldfish bowl out of thin air after an elaborate acrobatic manoeuvre.

"It was boring when I saw it, despite being very difficult," she said, and pointed out Long Tack Sam must have been quite the showman.

Family knew little about Long Tack Sam

Before Fleming made the film, he was little known in her own family.

"I knew he was a magician but I'd only heard a couple of things about him," she said.

"Maybe it was a show-business thing. A lot of children don't have great memories of a parent who is always on the road, always on tour. "

She interviewed dozens of former vaudevillians and people who'd known her great-grandfather and pieced together the story she now tells in her graphic novel.

Fleming inserts details of her own search in the narrative collage of her book, which combines archival photographs, reproductions of newspapers and playbills and traditional comic-style panels to tell the story.

"There are so many different stories to Long Tack Sam and I figured out that he was the author of most of them," she said.

The Magical Life of Long Tack Sam is published by Riverhead Books, a division of Penguin.