Astonishingly beautiful but narratively obscure.
The companion to Love: The Fox and Love: The Tiger (both 2015) takes its setting on the African savanna, where a male lion travels on the fringes of a pride.
Sepia-toned panels establish back story: a lioness downs a Thomson’s gazelle and is chased away from her prey by a big male, who snarls to drive away a young cub. The story proper opens as that cub, now grown, slinks alone in the rain to come across a pride, spars with one of its males and appears to best it, but then leaves, revolving around but never part of the pride for the rest of the book. Bertolucci’s trademark lush paintings arranged in wordless, cinematic panels depict the lion’s travels across spectacular savanna scenery populated by zebras, wildebeests, giraffes, and other fauna. Violence is depicted unflinchingly but without sensationalism. A moment of humor occurs when some cubs play a game of “ball” with a rolled-up pangolin. In one striking sequence, an airplane crashes in a fiery wreck; the lions observe but move on. In contrast to its predecessors, this tale, though accurately reflecting lion society, is visually hard to parse. The protagonist lion is distinguishable from the others only by his darker mane, and it may take readers two or three trips through to understand his relationship to the pride. The story’s interpretation of the concept of “love” is murkier still.
Astonishingly beautiful but narratively obscure. (Graphic adventure. 10 & up)Pub Date: July 12, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-942367-09-3
Page Count: 80
Publisher: Magnetic Press
Review Posted Online: May 31, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2016
BOOK REVIEW
A gorgeous symphony.
Illustrator McGuire (What’s Wrong With This Book, 1997, etc.) once again frames a fixed space across the millennia.
McGuire’s original treatment of the concept—published in 1989 in Raw magazine as six packed pages—here gives way to a graphic novel’s worth of two-page spreads, and the work soars in the enlarged space. Pages unspool like a player-piano roll, each spread filled by a particular time, while inset, ever shifting panels cut windows to other eras, everything effervescing with staggered, interrelated vignettes and arresting images. Researchers looking for Native American artifacts in 1986 pay a visit to the house that sprouts up in 1907, where a 1609 Native American couple flirtatiously recalls the legend of a local insatiable monster, while across the room, an attendee of a 1975 costume party shuffles in their direction, dressed as a bear with arms outstretched. A 1996 fire hose gushes into a 1934 floral bouquet, its shape echoed by a billowing sheet on the following page, in 2015. There’s a hint of Terrence Malick’s beautiful malevolence as panels of nature—a wolf in 1430 clenching its prey’s bloody haunch; the sun-dappled shallows of 2113’s new sea—haunt scenes of domesticity. McGuire also plays with the very concept of panels: a boy flaunts a toy drum in small panels of 1959 while a woman in 1973 sets up a projection screen (a panel in its own right) that ultimately displays the same drummer boy from a new angle; in 2050, a pair of old men play with a set of holographic panels arranged not unlike the pages of the book itself and find a gateway to the past. Later spreads flash with terrible and ancient supremacy, impending cataclysm, and distant, verdant renaissance, then slow to inevitable, irresistible conclusion. The muted colors and soft pencils further blur individual moments into a rich, eons-spanning whole.
A gorgeous symphony.Pub Date: Dec. 9, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-375-40650-8
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: Oct. 14, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2014
Of late, there have been many unsuccessful attempts to adapt Shakespeare into the graphic-novel format; Hinds’s beautiful new offering now sets the standard that all others will strive to meet. Presenting readers with deftly drawn characters (based on live models) and easily read dialogue that modulates over the course of the work from adapted prose to the original Shakespeare, he re-works the classic Shakespeare play of deception, greed and revenge. Though located in a modern setting, readers will easily follow the premise and find themselves lost in the intricately lovely Venetian backdrop. While this adaptation may leave purists sniffing at the omission of entire scenes and characters, Hinds carefully explains to his readers in a note why and how he made those choices. A deceptively simple graphic novel on the surface, this volume begs for multiple readings on a closer level, at the same time acting as a wonderful introduction to the original. Easily on a par with his stellar adaptation of Beowulf (2007), it’s a captivating, smartly executed work. (Graphic novel. 12+)
Pub Date: May 1, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-7636-3024-9
Page Count: 80
Publisher: Candlewick
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2008
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