A breathless and colorfully rendered saga of an ex-soldier’s flight from a cadre of bounty hunters—and from his own past.
A former soldier and his robot companion struggle for survival in Perillo’s comic SF graphic novel, featuring art by Cardoselli.
Disruption is the essence of classic dystopian fiction. However, the problems that face a New Yorker called Peace Dog—a former soldier scarred by brutal events in his past—feel more extreme than most. One is unbreathable air, which only Air Co.’s oxygen generators can remedy, and few people can afford them. Like his fellow city dwellers, Peace Dog is preoccupied with the grueling business of survival, and he’s ducking a crew of unbalanced hunters who hope to collect a bounty on him (“My gun is pointed at a head worth $100,000,” says one early on). The Big Apple depicted here is a rotten one, with its fabled features—such as Central Park, now only a barren desert—rendered largely unrecognizable by recent calamities. Along comes the Kid, a robotic youth who wants Peace Dog to help him escape from the dangerous city to the Northern Mountains and finally find some measure of peace. Understandably, Peace Dog is skeptical (“I don’t help anybody”), but he eventually signs on, presumably emboldened by his superior combat skills and adeptness with a samurai sword. What the pair encounter, as the story progresses, will push them to their physical and mental limits. Perillo and Cardoselli’s tale traverses the type of terrain that will instantly feel familiar to any fan of Mad Max (1979) or Escape From New York (1981). Any new creator in the post-apocalyptic genre faces an uphill battle, because the groundwork was cast in cement long ago, but the creators prove up to the challenge in these pages. The brisk and bare-knuckled hardboiled storytelling unfolds at a rapid clip, and an unlikely blend of SF and Western elements in a detailed style works heavily in its favor. For teenage fans who can’t get enough of dystopias, this offbeat, action-oriented cocktail should prove to be irresistible.
A breathless and colorfully rendered saga of an ex-soldier’s flight from a cadre of bounty hunters—and from his own past.Pub Date: May 27, 2025
ISBN: 9781545812563
Page Count: 88
Publisher: Mad Cave Studios
Review Posted Online: April 30, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2025
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
Lush visuals bring this thoughtfully constructed tale to life.
Wondrous visitors encounter a desperate pocket of humanity.
Lori, a white orphaned teen who’s finally been adopted after bouncing around various foster homes, awakens to discover that nearly everyone has disappeared. The rapture? Maybe. She runs into her classmate Annette, who has brown skin and curly black hair, and they partner up to scavenge for food. The pair tries to evade several threats, such as the large Wolves and a gang called The Dogs. Supernatural Giants arrive, seemingly from space, speaking an impenetrable language of “musical chiming and weird bass-rhythms.” Lori and Annette then meet Beatrice, an older white woman who shares important observations about the Giants and Wolves. The tone of the story then subtly shifts from post-apocalyptic desperation to one that’s somewhat playful. After a certain point, a visual element that appears early on takes on clear significance and meaning in the context of the story at large, offering a subversively humorous twist for readers to consider and a creative element that deviates from other alien invasion narratives. Hans’ artwork and paneling fill each scene with wonders. An interaction with a giant sees the red, violet, and pink figure standing against a bright, otherworldly white-and-blue backdrop with dark contours. Elsewhere, Lori and Annette pause at night as they behold ominous shadows, their foggy breath forming clouds, and they hear a “KRRNCH” sound. The quick-moving plot wraps everything up neatly.
Lush visuals bring this thoughtfully constructed tale to life. (character designs) (Graphic science fiction. 14-adult)Pub Date: Nov. 12, 2024
ISBN: 9781534387072
Page Count: 104
Publisher: Image Comics
Review Posted Online: Aug. 17, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2024
A Rand primer with pictures.
A graphic novel for devotees of Ayn Rand.
With its men who have become gods through rugged individualism, the fiction of Ayn Rand has consistently had something of a comic strip spirit to it. So the mating of Rand and graphic narrative would seem to be long overdue, with her 1938 novella better suited to a quick read than later, more popular work such as The Fountainhead (1943) and the epic Atlas Shrugged (1957). As Anthem shows, well before the Cold War (or even World War II), Rand was railing against the evils of any sort of collectivism and the stifling of individualism, warning that this represented a return to the Dark Ages. Here, her allegory hammers the point home. It takes place in the indeterminate future, a period after “the Great Rebirth” marked an end of “the Unmentionable Times.” Now people have numbers as names and speak of themselves as “we,” with no concept of “I.” The hero, drawn to stereotypical, flowing-maned effect by illustrator Staton, knows himself as Equality 7-2521 and knows that “it is evil to be superior.” A street sweeper, he stumbles upon the entrance to a tunnel, where he discovers evidence of scientific advancement, from a time when “men knew secrets that we have lost.” He inevitably finds a nubile mate. He calls her “the Golden One.” She calls him “the Unconquered.” Their love, of course, is forbidden, and not just because she is 17. After his attempt to play Prometheus, bringing light to a society that prefers the dark, the two escape to the “uncharted forest,” where they are Adam and Eve. “I have my mind. I shall live my own truth,” he proclaims, having belatedly discovered the first-person singular. The straightforward script penned by Santino betrays no hint of tongue-in-cheek irony.
A Rand primer with pictures.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-451-23217-5
Page Count: 144
Publisher: NAL/Berkley
Review Posted Online: Dec. 2, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2010
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