As satisfying and enjoyable as a big-budget animated sci-fi feature.
A year after the worst day in Luke’s life, a chance encounter in the forest sparks a grand adventure.
Luke and his older brother, Kyle, are playing in the woods when a gang of bullies causes an accident that leaves Kyle dead and Luke without his brother and best friend. A year later, a flash in the forest leads the white boy to a strange device that clamps onto his forearm. Then, chased by a mummy, a skeleton in a spacesuit, and “vampire Napoleon,” Luke is rescued by an equally odd team: a robot Abe Lincoln, an Asian-featured ghost named Artemis, a dinosaur named Zinc, and Doc—the white inventor who, it turns out, invented the device on Luke’s arm. The mummy, skeleton and Napoleon are after the device, which facilitates access to the multiverse. To evade them, Luke and his new friends shift to an alternate Earth where spiders the size of humans inhabit what looks like the Old West. With the bad guys on their trail, can the good guys rescue a kidnapped Abe Lincoln and keep the device out of the hands of their pursuers’ diabolical boss? Grine’s time-and-space adventure is a full-color, action-stuffed tale with plenty of slapstick and sarcastic humor. Luke’s ragtag new acquaintances are an interesting bunch, and the villains are suitably silly and sinister.
As satisfying and enjoyable as a big-budget animated sci-fi feature. (Graphic science fiction. 9-12)Pub Date: May 30, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-545-92659-1
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Graphix/Scholastic
Review Posted Online: March 5, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2017
A bonbon for Tintin fans.
Bad guys are traveling back in time, and it’s up to a fixer named Mortensen to repair the damage.
In this kickoff episode, a picture of an airplane in an old manuscript sends secret agent Mortensen to 16th-century Loch Ness. He goes twice, once to see the evidence (including the plane’s large cargo of stolen books from many eras) destroyed, and then a second time to rescue the mute, comely, hatchet-wielding young “witch” Blossom who had helped keep him from being burned at the stake. Looking particularly dapper in a duster and long scarf over formal evening wear, the imperturbable hero surmounts one crisis after another. Though the plot is as airy and light on internal logic as can be, readers will be carried along by both his élan and by the charged-up pace of his misadventures. Jakobsen’s cartoon panels are small but discrete, and he keeps the dialogue pithy, his figures clearly drawn and the action easy to follow.
A bonbon for Tintin fans. (historical afterwords on manuscript illumination, witch hunts and other related topics) (Graphic science fiction. 10-12)Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-8225-9409-3
Page Count: 48
Publisher: Graphic Universe
Review Posted Online: June 12, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2012
Dedicated spy-thriller and sci-fi fans would probably be able to fill in the blanks, but it’s not worth the effort.
A disappointing second outing finds the titular time-traveling secret agent darting his way through a tangle of nefarious schemes so messy and incoherent that readers have no chance of following him.
A researcher (seemingly) kidnapped in 1973 for nebulous reasons…a mysterious meteoric metal mined in Tanzania in the 1920s and stolen by Nazis for never-explained purposes in 1942…a short hitchhike with the historical French “Black Cruise” through the Iringa rain forest in 1925…a discovery in conveniently untouched former Nazi offices in 1950 Denmark…a car chase and a double ambush in New Mexico….Switching decade and locale with a page turn or, sometimes, just between one panel and the next, Jakobsen pitches his ever-natty hero into and, with equal ease, out of one heavily contrived, tenuously related situation after another. Muddying the waters further, he also folds in supporting characters who either look too much alike to keep straight or are unrecognizable (with the exception of Einstein) caricatures of a suddenly-revealed “League of Extraordinary Scientists.”
Dedicated spy-thriller and sci-fi fans would probably be able to fill in the blanks, but it’s not worth the effort. (historical notes on rain forests, Nazi plunder and other related topics, with period images, appended) (Graphic science fiction. 10-12)Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-8225-9421-5
Page Count: 48
Publisher: Graphic Universe
Review Posted Online: June 12, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2012
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