He wasn’t gentle. Let’s get that out of the way. It’s the easy thing to say about him, the thing movie costars from his Princess Bride days would trot out in interviews because it made an efficient sound bite — oh, Andre? He looks so scary, but he wouldn’t hurt a fly. People loved him, and when you love a very large man who deals in violence for a living you look for ways to minimize the importance of the violence. You say, “but that’s not really who he is.” Andre was slow, and he moved carefully, and he had those vague, sad, deep-set eyes; it took a less than giant-size leap to convince yourself that his size and career path belied an essential delicacy, a fragility even, as though he were a kind of tragically mistranslated child.

The trouble with this interpretation is that Andre Roussimoff, a.k.a. Monster Roussimoff, a.k.a. Monster Eiffel Tower, a.k.a. Géant Ferré, a.k.a. Giant Machine, a.k.a. Andre the Giant, was neither particularly childlike nor particularly averse to fly-hurting. Very large men who deal in violence for a living are seldom unchanged by what they do, even when the violence is mostly symbolic and theatrical, as it was for Andre. Box Brown’s terrific graphic biography Andre the Giant: Life and Legend portrays a man who is perfectly aware of his power to intimidate and perfectly content to treat force as an acceptable outcome to a normal Wednesday evening — not that your Wednesday evenings generally stood out for their normalcy when you were Andre the Giant.

In Brown’s book, Andre’s capacity for physical violence works as a kind of counterweight to the psychological violence the world and his own body inflict on him. Sad sacks in a bar point at him and treat him like a freak, so he flips their car over with them inside. He’s in pain all the time as a result of his acromegaly, the syndrome that caused his gigantism, so inflicting hurt is a way of reflecting his own condition outward. Not that he’s a sadist, just that pain is never on the far side of some sacred threshold for him. It’s a language that he speaks. There’s a relief when a fight breaks out, almost a cheerfulness. Fighting creates a reality in which he isn’t out of scale. Holding a fork or driving a car, when you are more than 7 feet tall and weigh 500 pounds, will always be cramped, compromised, suggestively bizarre. Hurling a 300-pound man from a wrestling ring, or tackling someone through a plate-glass window at a party, forces the world to make a different sort of sense.

I read Brown’s book this week because of the news from New York Comic Con that another graphic-novel version of Andre’s life story is coming out in December, this one with the support of his daughter, Robin Christensen-Roussimoff. Andre’s life makes a natural subject for graphic-novel treatment because the form can exaggerate and stylize his immensity while also, in an important way, liberating him from it — showing you the soul shining out through the progressively heavier and more ponderous and more self-defeating flesh.1 And then, too, there’s something right about seeing professional wrestling given the comic-book treatment, which has a bit of a history rendering muscle-bound men in spandex.