A beautifully illustrated and mind-bending speculative tale.
In So’s graphic novel, a woman awakens to find that she’s been missing for three years and tries to remember where she’s been.
Billie Lee wakes up in bed with her father by her side. Confused, she learns that she ran away three years earlier and has been missing ever since—she was recently found lying in the street with a sketchbook in her hand. Billie doesn’t even remember the argument she had with her father that led to her running away, let alone where she’s been for the past three years. Guided by the sketchbook she was found with, she visits various places throughout the city, trying to find something to jog her memories. The more she studies the sketches, the weirder they seem; they’re not in any obvious kind of order, and despite some of the locations being busy thoroughfares, there are no people in the drawings. Billie comes upon a closed-down gallery. There’s a sketch of it in the book, and she gets a sudden memory of passing the location after running away from her home. With a rush, the memories come back: Billie had seen a painting in the gallery, and when she got closer, she found herself falling through the frame and floating down into an empty city. It’s not totally empty—she soon meets Baron Cheung, who introduces her to a world that exists in “a period of ‘reverse flow,’” where time moves backward and nothing new can be created. How could Billie and Baron exist in this reverse world for so long, and how did Billie find her way back home? In this stunningly illustrated graphic novel, So pens a tale of two people who find each other and discover how a reversal of time can affect their own creativity and life back in the real world. The story is compelling and thought-provoking, but the art is what really makes the work shine. The subtle hints of time moving backward—such as smoke and damage lessening after a fire—delight throughout the novel. This volume includes the artist’s sketchbook.
A beautifully illustrated and mind-bending speculative tale.Pub Date: May 12, 2026
ISBN: 9781545826508
Page Count: 124
Publisher: Nakama Press
Review Posted Online: May 25, 2026
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
Gorgeous and troubling.
Cartoonist Kuper (Kafkaesque, 2018, etc.) delivers a graphic-novel adaptation of Joseph Conrad’s literary classic exploring the horror at the center of colonial exploitation.
As a group of sailors floats on the River Thames in 1899, a particularly adventurous member notes that England was once “one of the dark places of the earth,” referring to the land before the arrival of the Romans. This well-connected vagabond then regales his friends with his boyhood obsession with the blank places on maps, which eventually led him to captain a steamboat up a great African river under the employ of a corporate empire dedicated to ripping the riches from foreign land. Marlow’s trip to what was known as the Dark Continent exposes him to the frustrations of bureaucracy, the inhumanity employed by Europeans on the local population, and the insanity plaguing those committed to turning a profit. In his introduction, Kuper outlines his approach to the original book, which featured extensive use of the n-word and worked from a general worldview that European males are the forgers of civilization (even if they suffered a “soul [that] had gone mad” for their efforts), explaining that “by choosing a different point of view to illustrate, otherwise faceless and undefined characters were brought to the fore without altering Conrad’s text.” There is a moment when a scene of indiscriminate shelling reveals the Africans fleeing, and there are some places where the positioning of the Africans within the panel gives them more prominence, but without new text added to fully frame the local people, it’s hard to feel that they have reached equal footing. Still, Kuper’s work admirably deletes the most offensive of Conrad’s language while presenting graphically the struggle of the native population in the face of foreign exploitation. Kuper is a master cartoonist, and his pages and panels are a feast for the eyes.
Gorgeous and troubling.Pub Date: Nov. 5, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-393-63564-5
Page Count: 160
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: Aug. 18, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2019
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