A fantastical graphic novel with superlative artwork and inventive plot devices that’s somewhat marred by inadequate...
Writer Wolf (Unbeatable: Hotter than Hell, 2010, etc.), debut illustrator Jimenez, and debut colorist Cabellé ingeniously combine Arthurian legend and epic space opera in a new graphic novel.
Young Cat is sent to an orphanage after her father inexplicably attempts to drown her. Thereafter, her story doesn’t get much happier, as her fellow orphans mercilessly bully her. She eventually snaps and pummels the other children, exhibiting innate fighting prowess while doing so. Enter the wizard Merlin, who snatches her away from the orphanage in order to train her with the Protectors of the Sword, a warrior guild devoted to keeping Excalibur safe after the death of King Arthur. Cat eventually proves herself as Excalibur’s Keeper, destined to wield the weapon until the emergence of the rightful king. However, when she claims the weapon, it upsets a demonic underground being who sends his minions to stop her. The story goes on to turn tropes of the Arthurian legend on their heads in plot twists involving spacecraft, mecha-suited warriors, and the lost city of Atlantis. Cat is aided by Heinz, her only friend from the orphanage, who grows from a pudgy, scrappy child into a brawny love interest. What could have been a random hodgepodge of genre tropes instead becomes a unique alternative history of Excalibur. However, Wolf doesn’t sketch Cat’s psyche beyond her sadness and her outsized fighting abilities, which results in some disorienting character beats: she slaughters most of the men she grew up with on Merlin’s command, for example, yet experiences no apparent emotional fallout. The author spends a little more time on Heinz, who charmingly spends the entire book wearing a flowered purple hat—a gift from his dead father. Generally, though, characterization takes a back seat to plot movement and extended battle sequences. Jimenez and Cabellé produce some gorgeous, dynamic pages; high points include a scene involving monsters interrupting a farmer’s peaceful morning and a clever “training montage” of Cat fighting across multiple panels, each set in a different season. The book’s high-quality, glossy paper allows Cabellé’s broad color spectrum to shine.
A fantastical graphic novel with superlative artwork and inventive plot devices that’s somewhat marred by inadequate characterization.Pub Date: July 31, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-9798689-2-4
Page Count: 206
Publisher: Razor Wolf Entertainment
Review Posted Online: June 21, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
This large, stately, and intensely powerful new novel by the author of Terms of Endearment and The Last Picture Show is constructed around a cattle drive—an epic journey from dry, hard-drinking south Texas, where a band of retired Texas Rangers has been living idly, to the last outpost and the last days of the old, unsettled West in rough Montana. The time is the 1880s. The characters are larger than life and shimmer: Captain Woodrow Call, who leads the drive, is the American type of an unrelentingly righteous man whose values are puritanical and pioneering and whose orders, which his men inevitably follow, lead, toward the end, to their deaths; talkative Gus McCrae, Call's best friend, learned, lenient, almost magically skilled in a crisis, who is one of those who dies; Newt, the unacknowledged 17-year-old son of Captain Call's one period of self-indulgence and the inheritor of what will become a new and kinder West; and whores, drivers, misplaced sheriffs and scattered settlers, all of whom are drawn sharply, engagingly, movingly. As the rag-tag band drives the cattle 3,000 miles northward, only Call fails to learn that his quest to conquer more new territories in the West is futile—it's a quest that perishes as men are killed by natural menaces that soon will be tamed and by half-starved renegades who soon will die at the hands of those less heroic than themselves. McMurtry shows that it is a quest misplaced in history, in a landscape that is bare of buffalo but still mythic; and it is only one of McMurtry's major accomplishments that he does it without forfeiting a grain of the characters' sympathetic power or of the book's considerable suspense. This is a masterly novel. It will appeal to all lovers of fiction of the first order.
Pub Date: June 1, 1985
ISBN: 068487122X
Page Count: 872
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 30, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1985
IN THE NEWS
SEEN & HEARD
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