A beautifully crafted and ultimately moving tale of fame and corruption.
Mullane offers a graphic novel about the dark forces behind a popular rock group.
At the heart of this story, featuring full-color, painterly art by Lotay, is the rising Los Angeles rock band The Moon Show, its roster of louche young men, and the all-female assortment of hardcore groupies who follow the musicians, hang out after hours, and frequently find themselves sleeping with various band members. These women—Amina, Vera Vicious, Lisa Storm, Morgaine, and Gaia—know every lyric and attend every show and drug-fueled afterparty. Lisa is especially struck by the band member Si. “He’s like something out of a fairytale,” Lisa notes. “We can all feel the energy. It is magic.” When Amina goes missing after an evening alone with him, the other women, and particularly Vera, become increasingly worried. The band’s fame is going national, and the groupies are encountering an increasing number of oddities in their orbit, including ecstatic states and weird, disturbing dreams; meanwhile, the members seem increasingly driven by their baser hungers: “Beauty used to unsettle them, knock them off their game. We had power over them,” one groupie reflects, before noting that beauty doesn't have that effect anymore. Gradually, Vera and Gaia and the others begin to realize that much darker forces might be backing The Moon Show for reasons that have little to do with selling records. Accompanied by Lotay’s sumptuously fluid and sensuous artwork, Mullane’s story takes readers deep inside a boozy, druggy world of full-time rock groupies and then very skillfully transforms it into something much more ominous and supernatural. The book takes the woolly old plot of a rock band willing to sell its soul for success and infuses it with seductive undertones of raunchy sex and fragile hopes. Mullane also provides a knowingly ironic twist that will make readers chuckle to remember that some real-life bands are still going strong after 50 years of touring.
A beautifully crafted and ultimately moving tale of fame and corruption.Pub Date: Feb. 10, 2026
ISBN: 9781545821268
Page Count: 152
Publisher: Mad Cave Studios
Review Posted Online: Dec. 2, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2026
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
Using modern language, McDonald spins the well-known tale of the two young, unrequited lovers. Set against Nagar’s at-times...
A bland, uninspired graphic adaptation of the Bard’s renowned love story.
Using modern language, McDonald spins the well-known tale of the two young, unrequited lovers. Set against Nagar’s at-times oddly psychedelic-tinged backgrounds of cool blues and purples, the mood is strange, and the overall ambiance of the story markedly absent. Appealing to what could only be a high-interest/low–reading level audience, McDonald falls short of the mark. He explains a scene in an open-air tavern with a footnote—“a place where people gather to drink”—but he declines to offer definitions for more difficult words, such as “dirges.” While the adaptation does follow the foundation of the play, the contemporary language offers nothing; cringeworthy lines include Benvolio saying to Romeo at the party where he first meets Juliet, “Let’s go. It’s best to leave now, while the party’s in full swing.” Nagar’s faces swirl between dishwater and grotesque, adding another layer of lost passion in a story that should boil with romantic intensity. Each page number is enclosed in a little red heart; while the object of this little nuance is obvious, it’s also unpleasantly saccharine. Notes after the story include such edifying tidbits about Taylor Swift and “ ‘Wow’ dialogs from the play” (which culls out the famous quotes).Pub Date: May 10, 2011
ISBN: 978-93-80028-58-3
Page Count: 80
Publisher: Campfire
Review Posted Online: April 5, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2011
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