A respectful, leisurely paced work of historical fiction.
A British sailor’s experiences as a prisoner of the Mowachaht people from 1803 to 1805 are retold in graphic form.
In March 1803, the trading ship Boston dropped anchor in Nootka Sound, west of Vancouver Island, near a village known as Friendly Cove. The crew intended only a brief stay to make repairs and resupply, but their plans went awry after their captain gravely insulted the local tribe’s leader, Maquinna. For the Mowachaht, it was the latest in a long series of offenses by white visitors, and they retaliated violently, killing most of the crew. However, Maquinna spared and enslaved John Jewitt, the ship’s young blacksmith and armorer, due to the usefulness of his skills. In retelling Jewitt’s story, Goldsmith draws not only upon Jewitt’s journals (kept in secret throughout his captivity), but also on other historical records, contemporary First Nations sources, and her own imagination. The result is a character-driven survival story—one in which Jewitt’s genuine rapport with his captors conflicts with his unwavering desire to return home. The full-color illustrations (done by penciler Short, inker Dembicki, and colorist Keeling) take few risks with style or paneling, but they establish a strong sense of the time, the place, and Mowachaht culture.
A respectful, leisurely paced work of historical fiction. (author’s note, foreword, maps, list of commonly spoken words in the Nootkan language) (Graphic historical fiction. 12-18)Pub Date: Sept. 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-936218-11-0
Page Count: 168
Publisher: Fulcrum
Review Posted Online: Sept. 15, 2015
Using modern language, McDonald spins the well-known tale of the two young, unrequited lovers. Set against Nagar’s at-times...
A bland, uninspired graphic adaptation of the Bard’s renowned love story.
Using modern language, McDonald spins the well-known tale of the two young, unrequited lovers. Set against Nagar’s at-times oddly psychedelic-tinged backgrounds of cool blues and purples, the mood is strange, and the overall ambiance of the story markedly absent. Appealing to what could only be a high-interest/low–reading level audience, McDonald falls short of the mark. He explains a scene in an open-air tavern with a footnote—“a place where people gather to drink”—but he declines to offer definitions for more difficult words, such as “dirges.” While the adaptation does follow the foundation of the play, the contemporary language offers nothing; cringeworthy lines include Benvolio saying to Romeo at the party where he first meets Juliet, “Let’s go. It’s best to leave now, while the party’s in full swing.” Nagar’s faces swirl between dishwater and grotesque, adding another layer of lost passion in a story that should boil with romantic intensity. Each page number is enclosed in a little red heart; while the object of this little nuance is obvious, it’s also unpleasantly saccharine. Notes after the story include such edifying tidbits about Taylor Swift and “ ‘Wow’ dialogs from the play” (which culls out the famous quotes).Pub Date: May 10, 2011
ISBN: 978-93-80028-58-3
Page Count: 80
Publisher: Campfire
Review Posted Online: April 5, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2011
Gorgeous and troubling.
Cartoonist Kuper (Kafkaesque, 2018, etc.) delivers a graphic-novel adaptation of Joseph Conrad’s literary classic exploring the horror at the center of colonial exploitation.
As a group of sailors floats on the River Thames in 1899, a particularly adventurous member notes that England was once “one of the dark places of the earth,” referring to the land before the arrival of the Romans. This well-connected vagabond then regales his friends with his boyhood obsession with the blank places on maps, which eventually led him to captain a steamboat up a great African river under the employ of a corporate empire dedicated to ripping the riches from foreign land. Marlow’s trip to what was known as the Dark Continent exposes him to the frustrations of bureaucracy, the inhumanity employed by Europeans on the local population, and the insanity plaguing those committed to turning a profit. In his introduction, Kuper outlines his approach to the original book, which featured extensive use of the n-word and worked from a general worldview that European males are the forgers of civilization (even if they suffered a “soul [that] had gone mad” for their efforts), explaining that “by choosing a different point of view to illustrate, otherwise faceless and undefined characters were brought to the fore without altering Conrad’s text.” There is a moment when a scene of indiscriminate shelling reveals the Africans fleeing, and there are some places where the positioning of the Africans within the panel gives them more prominence, but without new text added to fully frame the local people, it’s hard to feel that they have reached equal footing. Still, Kuper’s work admirably deletes the most offensive of Conrad’s language while presenting graphically the struggle of the native population in the face of foreign exploitation. Kuper is a master cartoonist, and his pages and panels are a feast for the eyes.
Gorgeous and troubling.Pub Date: Nov. 5, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-393-63564-5
Page Count: 160
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: Aug. 18, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2019
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