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
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
Chwast and Twain are a match made in heaven.
Design veteran Chwast delivers another streamlined, graphic adaptation of classic literature, this time Mark Twain’s caustic, inventive satire of feudal England.
Chwast (Tall City, Wide Country, 2013, etc.) has made hay anachronistically adapting classic texts, whether adding motorcycles to The Canterbury Tales (2011) or rocket ships to The Odyssey (2012), so Twain’s tale of a modern-day (well, 19th-century) engineer dominating medieval times via technology—besting Merlin with blasting powder—is a fastball down the center. (The source material already had knights riding bicycles!) In Chwast’s rendering, bespectacled hero Hank Morgan looks irresistible, plated in armor everywhere except from his bow tie to the top of his bowler hat, sword cocked behind head and pipe clenched in square jaw. Inexplicably sent to sixth-century England by a crowbar to the head, Morgan quickly ascends nothing less than the court of Camelot, initially by drawing on an uncanny knowledge of historical eclipses to present himself as a powerful magician. Knowing the exact date of a celestial event from more than a millennium ago is a stretch, but the charm of Chwast’s minimalistic adaption is that there are soon much better things to dwell on, such as the going views on the church, politics and society, expressed as a chart of literal back-stabbing and including a note that while the upper class may murder without consequence, it’s kill and be killed for commoners and slaves. Morgan uses his new station as “The Boss” to better the primitive populous via telegraph lines, newspapers and steamboats, but it’s the deplorably savage civility of the status quo that he can’t overcome, even with land mines, Gatling guns and an electric fence. The subject of class manipulation—and the power of passion over reason—is achingly relevant, and Chwast’s simple, expressive illustrations resonate with a childlike earnestness, while his brief, pointed annotations add a sly acerbity. His playful mixing of perspectives within single panels gives the work an aesthetic somewhere between medieval tapestry and Colorforms.
Chwast and Twain are a match made in heaven.Pub Date: Feb. 18, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-60819-961-7
Page Count: 144
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2013
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