A handsome, undercooked curio best enjoyed by Springsteen’s devoted—and in conjunction with the source material.
Cartoonist Caruso (Heart Transplant, 2010, etc.) adapts Springsteen’s song about the inescapability of one’s own nature into a picture book.
We meet Pete as a baby in nothing but a diaper and a 10-gallon hat, and within three pages, the enfant terrible has been in jail and robbed a bank (strangely, in that order). In the blink of an eye, he’s 25—and has added murder and horse theft to his resume. But a dream of his own death drives him out West and into domestic bliss…until a bounty hunter arrives to hold Pete accountable for his sins. The text is taken verbatim from Springsteen’s 2009 song of the same name, and the work shares the doomed melancholy of many of the musician’s working-class ballads. However, Pete’s apocryphal origin and lack of clear motivation keep the book from delivering the complex ache of a Springsteen classic like “Highway Patrolman.” Caruso’s mix of cartoon figures and oil-painted, impressionistic backgrounds is enjoyably kinetic (the fleet-footed, bank-robbing baby is a delight), but the pictures’ literal representation—rather than interpretation—of the text feels like a missed opportunity for fuller collaboration. (What, exactly, was the vision of death that so radically changed Pete’s trajectory? Caruso offers only a skull and crossbones.) In the original, music lends layers of emotion, expansion and pacing that are lacking here. However, reading the book in tandem with the song (easy enough to achieve in the age of iTunes) breathes new life into the pages, Springsteen’s vocals illuminate cadences lost in Caruso’s packed and stacked Schoolhouse Rock!–style treatment of the refrain. But while songs can trade in atmospherics and repetition, invoking if not explicating, a picture book demands fuller narrative and richer interplay between words and images; here, there are simply lyrics on the page.
A handsome, undercooked curio best enjoyed by Springsteen’s devoted—and in conjunction with the source material.Pub Date: Nov. 4, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-5011-0385-8
Page Count: 56
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Oct. 19, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2014
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Farewell, bloodsuckers! Hail, Azriel the Ghost! So thinks the reader plunging into Rice's latest supernatural epic, in which Azriel, the Wandering Babylonian Ghost who cannot die, replaces Rice's familiar casts of vampires and witches. The first half of the novel shows Rice (Memnoch the Devil, 1995, etc.) at her descriptive best, her purple pen limning Babylon's hanging gardens, golden passageways, and jeweled clothing. Young Azriel, a Jew who works for the Babylonian priests and whose best friend is the god Marduk, is murdered by a magician who coats Azriel's bones with heavy gold: Throughout the ages any magician who owns the bones can call forth Azriel, a rebel ghost and impudent genie. Rice imaginatively describes in depth the swimming spirit world of competing gods and ghosts who, unseen, walk the streets of Babylon, and the reader surrenders happily to their presence amid the ancient splendor. Azriel hops and skips through the centuries and through a number of masters until suddenly, seemingly unsummoned, appearing before a Fifth Avenue clothing store in time to see wealthy young Esther Belkin murdered, Azriel quickly kills the three assassins who've driven ice picks into her. But why is he here in this reelingly strange modern Babylon of skyscrapers and hurtling taxis? It's soon clear that Esther's death is the sacrifice of his own daughter to God by multibillionaire televangelist Gregory Belkin, high priest of the Temple of the Minds. Gregory has a worldwide following and is about to wipe out much of the earth's population so that he can "rise from the dead" and become the globe's Messiah. Can Azriel stop him? The novel is dedicated to GOD, who may find Rice's modern-day scenes plotted waveringly as she paddles about. Lesser readers may wish she'd stayed in Babylon, where their suspension of disbelief and her imaginative energies are at their strongest.
Pub Date: Aug. 1, 1996
ISBN: 1613771738
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1996
Kuper’s black-heavy style, best used in his narrative work, here deadens jokes that need air and light: he’s a great talent...
A regular contributor to magazines as diverse as Time and Mad, Kuper collects a second batch of his “Eye of the Beholder” cartoons, all in the same basic pattern: “four panels of clues to guess which point of view your eyes are following.”
The answer is on the next page in a single, larger frame. Fortunately, Kuper breaks the form with regularity. Not that he changes his panel pattern, but his mostly wordless, woodcut style cartoons don’t strictly follow his dictum: some aren’t literal points of view, some are imagined visual histories, and some are the desires of his hapless figures. Many of Kuper’s visual puzzles are politically pointed, with the pay-off frame packing the punch of an editorial: four views of white people tanning are seen by a black janitor; various guns on a rack are ogled by a young boy; floating garbage is viewed by a mermaid; a defoliated forest is watched by Tarzan.The best comics are the most surprising ones: four different frames seen by, among others, a window washer, a crash-test dummy, a construction working using a jackhammer, and a new-born baby. Often the four views serve as a visual history, with the punch-line frame including the person visualizing the past: a hotel maid sees the various inhabitants of the room she’s cleaning; a piece of gum on someone’s shoe ends a sequence on the history of its manufacture. The wittiest pieces confound reality: a jar of pills views its consumer in various stages; a turkey flashes on its future as dinner; and the Grim Reaper surveys his victims. Kuper uses himself to great effect: circling sharks turn out to be the lawyers surrounding him at a table; trees being converted to wood products end up in his hand as pencils; and, funniest of all, scenes of an empty bookstore are his views at a book-signing.
Kuper’s black-heavy style, best used in his narrative work, here deadens jokes that need air and light: he’s a great talent who hasn’t yet found a subject suited to his style.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2000
ISBN: 1-56163-259-7
Page Count: 128
Publisher: NBM
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2000
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