A silly and exciting flight of fancy in the form of a thoughtfully crafted graphic novel.
An imaginative and playful misfit accidentally opens a portal to a fantastical reality in Turner’s graphic novel.
Zach Vandermeer’s imagination can get the young man into trouble: The graphic novel opens with a riveting chase scene filled with guns, fast cars, and a perilous cliff’s edge. It’s exciting and intense (“Twenty millimeter cannon blew out the windows; I felt the shells fly past!”)—and it’s also not real. In a few pages and even fewer words, the author establishes Zach as a funny, creative protagonist adept at spinning stories. This is what makes him so great at Heroic Journeys, a role-playing game set in a fantasy world, which he plays with an eccentric and lovable group of friends. The harmless game takes a turn one stormy night when Zach introduces a new character: a small statue named Gunama, from a dig site near the lost city of Erkund. When the seemingly innocent game has ended and the friends have said goodbye, Zach wakes from an ominous dream and wanders outside to his backyard—except it isn’t his backyard. It’s a reality entirely set in Arthea, a fictional world created long ago by Zach and his brother, Peter. Zach recruits his friends to explore this new world with him. As the quirky gang encounters wraiths, goblins, fairies, and ghosts, they also discover that they can become their game characters—magical creatures themselves, with supernatural powers and abilities. Zach leads the way as they stumble through two worlds, swords brandished, ready for anything. Turner’s graphic tale is both silly and sincere, gratuitous and grounded. The five protagonists are delightfully nerdy and bursting with love—love they have for each other and love the author clearly has for them. They, rendered in intricate black-and-white illustrations, keep the reader eagerly turning pages to find out what else Arthea has in store. It’s a breezy, evenly paced story full of humor and escapist fun.
A silly and exciting flight of fancy in the form of a thoughtfully crafted graphic novel.Pub Date: Oct. 8, 2023
ISBN: 9781593623197
Page Count: 175
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: July 13, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
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 not-very-illuminating updating of Chaucer’s Tales.
Continuing his apparent mission to refract the whole of English culture and history through his personal lens, Ackroyd (Thames: The Biography, 2008, etc.) offers an all-prose rendering of Chaucer’s mixed-media masterpiece.
While Burton Raffel’s modern English version of The Canterbury Tales (2008) was unabridged, Ackroyd omits both “The Tale of Melibee” and “The Parson’s Tale” on the undoubtedly correct assumption that these “standard narratives of pious exposition” hold little interest for contemporary readers. Dialing down the piety, the author dials up the raunch, freely tossing about the F-bomb and Anglo-Saxon words for various body parts that Chaucer prudently described in Latin. Since “The Wife of Bath’s Tale” and “The Miller’s Tale,” for example, are both decidedly earthy in Middle English, the interpolated obscenities seem unnecessary as well as jarringly anachronistic. And it’s anyone’s guess why Ackroyd feels obliged redundantly to include the original titles (“Here bigynneth the Squieres Tales,” etc.) directly underneath the new ones (“The Squires Tale,” etc.); these one-line blasts of antique spelling and diction remind us what we’re missing without adding anything in the way of comprehension. The author’s other peculiar choice is to occasionally interject first-person comments by the narrator where none exist in the original, such as, “He asked me about myself then—where I had come from, where I had been—but I quickly turned the conversation to another course.” There seems to be no reason for these arbitrary elaborations, which muffle the impact of those rare times in the original when Chaucer directly addresses the reader. Such quibbles would perhaps be unfair if Ackroyd were retelling some obscure gem of Old English, but they loom larger with Chaucer because there are many modern versions of The Canterbury Tales. Raffel’s rendering captured a lot more of the poetry, while doing as good a job as Ackroyd with the vigorous prose.
A not-very-illuminating updating of Chaucer’s Tales.Pub Date: Nov. 16, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-670-02122-2
Page Count: 436
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2009
PERSPECTIVES
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