Fans will delight. Newcomers may be engaged if they can get through the deluge of jokes.
Nostalgic for campy humor and 1980s fantasies? Revisit the world of the film Big Trouble in Little China (1986).
In this graphic novel set several years later, Ching Dai, the Demon God of the East, has combined the worlds of the living and the dead, turning the Earth into a Hellpocalypse. How or why Ching Dai was unleashed, Jack Burton claims to know nothing about. He is, however, lured away from the safety of his lonely paradise into this disaster zone by the call of a “very attractive woman.” Regrettably, the individual is revealed as the previous villain, David Lo Pan, now mortal and in need of Jack’s help to save the world. These unlikely heroes begin their journey through the hellscape to Ching Dai’s throne in San Francisco’s Chinatown. Fans of the movie will enjoy callbacks of previous characters and the use of signature phrases. For those who are not familiar with it, there is enough exposition to allow them to follow along. The many jokes, enhanced by the expressive art, however, can bog down the story. The authors make some attempt to address the ethnic stereotypes and misogyny prevalent in the original work through humor. A variety of ethnicities are shown, especially Asian, with some dark-skinned secondary characters. The volume contains examples of variant cover art.
Fans will delight. Newcomers may be engaged if they can get through the deluge of jokes. (Graphic fantasy. 16-adult)Pub Date: Sept. 4, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-68415-204-9
Page Count: 112
Publisher: BOOM! Studios
Review Posted Online: Oct. 22, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
Large themes of loss, accountability, and redemption in a sometimes too neat package.
In rural Michigan, home to the family abuse and emotional distress Reardon captured so vividly in Billy Dead (1998), the specter of a dead child forces a woman to face herself and her demons.
At age ten, Mary Culpepper plotted to escape the strictures of her north Michigan hometown, where booze and adultery helped the populace make it though long nights. Instead of falling prey to those same sorrow-filled vices, she grows up to become a school-bus driver whose modus operandi is to absorb life’s shocks in stony silence. Her best friend Amy dubs her The Lone Rangerette. Physically impressive and earthy, a star at softball, Mary sleepwalks through life, remaining close to Amy even after she seduces away Mary’s husband, Carl. But then the discovery of little Jen Colby’s battered body in a closet in the house at the end of her bus route wreaks havoc with Mary’s carefully built defenses. Summoned to testify in the explosive case against the child’s mother, Mary suffers a breakdown. Her sleep is haunted by an oppressive granite figure she calls The Night Visitor, and her days are filled with fantasies of Number 34, the guy whose forearms catch her eye at the local tavern. The story starts slowly, and its many dangling references cause some early confusion; but effective conceits like that of “Loretta” as a personification of Mary’s feelings (her “heart”) who nevertheless acts independently of that sad—and mad—protagonist, add direction. While Mary struggles, Loretta, symbolic of Mary’s estrangement from herself, always knows what to do. Amid a surfeit of misery, the author shows the love and affection that can bind women together despite the jealousy and back-biting that grow in the fertile field of small-town life.
Large themes of loss, accountability, and redemption in a sometimes too neat package.Pub Date: May 1, 2000
ISBN: 0-375-50405-2
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2000
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
And now for something completely different . . . from the acclaimed Greek author of the suavely Ovidian Eroticon, this 1974 novel (his first) employs the currently obscure form of the “spiritual biography” (roughly akin to the saint’s life) to relate the adventures of Theodore P., a teacher of humanities assigned to a remote Greek island. Addressing his tale to the women in his life (a former and current lover, plus his sister), Theodore tells of being swallowed and regurgitated by a whale, being thrust into reprises of famous battles and acquaintance with eminent military and political figures (not to mention modern poets George Seferis and Yannis Ritsos), and residing in a city totally submerged by a catastrophic flood (though his fellow residents seem unperturbed, and go about their business as usual). A knowledge of Greece’s modern and recent history would doubtless enrich the reader’s understanding. But the amusing mix of dream vision, condensed history, magical realism, and sociopolitical satire keeps us happily bedazzled, and eagerly reading all the same.
Pub Date: July 4, 2000
ISBN: 1-873982-44-5
Page Count: 182
Publisher: Dedalus
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2000
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