A worthy continuation of a cherished legacy, hampered by a bloated denouement.
This six-issue collection concludes the first arc of the recently relaunched Batman series, pitting both Bruce Wayne and his chiropteran alter ego against a murderous secret society known as the Court of Owls, whose sinister roots snake through Gotham City’s history—and several generations of the Bat family.
Still recovering from his encounter with the Owls’ assassin, a Talon, Bruce Wayne suddenly finds his home and secret lair under siege by dozens of undead Talons—preserved and revived thanks to a serum developed by Mr. Freeze. The storyline springs out of DC Comics’ New 52 initiative, which softly rebooted the entire DC Universe in 2011, so Snyder’s (Swamp Thing, 2013) intertwining of new (though the owl-as-opposite-of-bat concept dates back to 1960s Justice League of America, the Council of Owls didn’t exist prior to New 52, despite their centuries-spanning history) and old villains (though Freeze himself gets a minor modernization to creepazoid) is a smart move, immediately grafting the Owls onto established Bat-lore. The battle with the invading Talons reveals a larger Owl plot to slaughter 40 prominent citizens of Gotham as a show of the Court’s dominance over the city. To thwart the pogrom, Wayne family stalwart Alfred Pennyworth sends out a call to arms to all members of the Bat family, and those threads are played out in the Night of the Owls crossover event (not collected here). In the aftermath, Batman tracks the Owls to their nest—only to face a new foe with an impossible link to the Wayne family. Unfortunately, this link is hammered (yammered?) home by page after page of running dialogue between Batman and this new Owlman (though he’s not explicitly named within the text) as they bash and smash and wrestle into the heavens. This overabundance of exposition near the end stifles both Snyder’s inspired plotting and Capullo’s (Haunt, 2011) deft sequential art; despite their uncanny ability to resemble the work of Todd McFarlane, John Romita Jr. and J. Scott Campbell, all within a short span of panels, Capullo’s illustrations have an irresistible dynamism, which is nearly overwhelmed by a froth of word bubbles.
A worthy continuation of a cherished legacy, hampered by a bloated denouement.Pub Date: March 26, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-401-23777-6
Page Count: 208
Publisher: DC Comics
Review Posted Online: April 28, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2013
BOOK REVIEW
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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