Not everyone loves a golem, but monster fans will speed through the pages, trying to guess the next surprise.
Early in this graphic novel, a character says, “Then I saw it…a monster. And I was happy.”
A golem isn’t the easiest monster to love. It’s built from ugly clay and mud, and it has an uncontrollable temper. Readers who are familiar with the old, Jewish golem legends will find the story relatively familiar, though there are a few surprises. Brik the golem has his name graffiti-tagged on his chest, and he fights off bullies and Russian gangsters. The story is full of surprises, and there’s a genuinely shocking plot twist toward the end of the book. Unfortunately, the impact of the moment is reduced by the pacing, as Singh’s panel-to-panel transitions are often confusing. His use of texture, however, is very skillful and makes Brik a visually compelling monster. Other characters are just as memorable, especially Drew, a lanky, redheaded Jewish boy. Most of the major characters are Jewish and white, though a brown-skinned woman named Sera works for the Jewish funeral home. She’s an expert on cabala, and she teaches the put-upon Drew how to create a golem. She’s one of the most appealing characters in the book, but then, every character is engaging—particularly the villains—because of the sharp, fast-paced dialogue.
Not everyone loves a golem, but monster fans will speed through the pages, trying to guess the next surprise. (Graphic adventure. 13-19)Pub Date: June 21, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-62010-392-0
Page Count: 144
Publisher: Oni Press
Review Posted Online: March 14, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2017
An original project worth watching as it shapes up to something that may be quite magnificent.
This black-and-white historical narrative, written and illustrated by Lutes, collects eight volumes of his ongoing comic book set in Berlin during the late ’20s. It’s a multilayered tale of love and politics at the beginning of the Nazi era, as Lutes follows the stories of three characters: a 20ish art student from the provinces, a textile worker, and a young Jewish radical. Their lives intersect in only the subtlest way—Lutes depicts them crossing paths at some great public events, such as the Mayday march that closes this part of his book. And Lutes plays with perspective in a visual sense as well, jumping from point-of-view frames to overhead angles, including one from a dirigible flying above in honor of the Kaiser. At street level, Lutes integrates his historical research smoothly, and cleverly evokes the sounds and smells of a city alive with public debate and private turmoil. The competing political factions include communists, socialists, democrats, nationalists, and fascists, and all of Lutes’s characters get swept up by events. Marthe, the beautiful art student, settles in with Kurt, the cynical and detached journalist; Gudrun, the factory worker, loses her job, and her nasty husband (to the Nazi party), then joins a communist cooperative with her young daughters; Schwartz, a teenager enamored with the memory of Rosa Luxembourg, balances his incipient politics with his religion at home and his passion for Houdini. The lesser figures seem fully realized as well, from the despotic art instructor to the reluctant street policeman. Cosmopolitan Berlin on the brink of disaster: Lutes captures the time and place with a historian’s precision and a cinematographer’s skill. His shifts from close-ups to fades work perfectly in his thin-line style, a crossbreed of dense-scene European comics and more simple comics styles on this side of the Atlantic.
An original project worth watching as it shapes up to something that may be quite magnificent.Pub Date: June 1, 2001
ISBN: 1-896597-29-7
Page Count: 212
Publisher: Drawn & Quarterly
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2001
BOOK REVIEW
A daringly placid novel about—here goes—a quiet, reflective serial killer. Leaving his first 13 victims behind in Oregon graves, Vann Siegert drives his pickup east, ending up in a small Massachusetts town where he rents a room with the Deans—postal worker Doug, his wife Jane, and their daughter Karen—takes a temporary job with the post office, drifts into an apathetic affair with his co-worker Ferrin, and resumes his affectless avocation, offering his bottle of Southern Comfort laced with poison to acquaintances, hitchhikers, stranded motorists, and the homeless. McCreary (Mount's Mistake, 1987) clearly knows that the success of Siegert's deadpan first-person narrative, with its ritual avoidance of suspense or even logical causality, depends on the storyteller's self-portrait, and though his principal revelatory devices—flashbacks showing Siegert's matter-of- fact abuse by his mother and his doubling with his dead brother Neil, moments of unfulfilled passion counterbalanced by understated homicides (Siegert is incapable of closeness to anyone but his victims and his dead), and, eventually, the arrest of Doug for Jane's murder after the police have picked up Siegert's own trail—press too schematically toward a rationale of Siegert's divided nature, the narrator-killer successfully resists his author's attempts to explain him away. Disturbingly effective in evoking the hypernormal killer. But don't expect the usual pleasures of the genre.
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1991
ISBN: 0-670-83414-9
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1991
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