by Jordan Mechner ; illustrated by LeUyen Pham ; Alex Puvilland ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 9, 2013
A sweeping medieval caper set amid the persecution of the Knights Templar during the early 14th century.
After righteously serving Christendom during the Crusades, the Knights Templar returned from the Holy Land and faced their new reality as a powerful army that answered only to the pope yet operated in lands ruled by kings. Mechner (The Making of Karateka, 2012, etc.) unspools their downfall—the result of trumped-up charges orchestrated by Nogaret, chancellor to the king of France, who is determined to seize the vast treasure the Templars have hidden in their Paris temple—by following the order’s less pious members. Boozing and lust keep a trio of knights, led by valiant Martin of Troyes, out of the initial sweep that imprisons nearly the entire order. Martin goes on to lead a ragtag team of Templar misfits on a quest to decipher the location of the treasure and spirit it away before Nogaret can claim it. The sprawling, often circuitous tale features a large cast of characters and a rich historical setting, but the two elements don’t fully mesh, both settling at the depth of a Hollywood blockbuster. Few Templars resist the outrageous persecution, and their limp response is addressed only in a remark by their browbeaten grand master: “In this new world there is no place for men like us.” The sentiment is poignant but largely unexplored, and the lack of fight from the Templars—who are, by all accounts, fierce warriors—gives the story an odd hollowness that undercuts its rousing third act. Illustrators Pham (The Boy Who Loved Math, 2013, etc.) and Puvilland (Solomon’s Thieves, 2010, etc.) imbue the book with a sketchy beauty that feels akin to the work of Guy Davis, though the influence of Puvilland’s role at DreamWorks Animation is also apparent. The art’s small details are the best, like a flung canteen frozen in midair, windblown shrubs on a lonesome street, a long-imprisoned Templar shielding his eyes from the sun, or the tilted head and closed eyes of a distant kiss.
An explosive but overly wound clockwork whose center doesn’t hold.Pub Date: July 9, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-59643-393-9
Page Count: 480
Publisher: First Second
Review Posted Online: July 7, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2013
Categories: GENERAL GRAPHIC NOVELS & COMICS | SCIENCE FICTION & FANTASY
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by Jordan Mechner & A.B. Sina & illustrated by Alex Puvilland & LeUyen Pham
by Mark Twain ; adapted by Seymour Chwast ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 18, 2014
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. 3, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2013
Categories: GENERAL GRAPHIC NOVELS & COMICS
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by Mark Twain ; edited by Benjamin Griffin Harriet E. Smith
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by Mark Twain edited by Benjamin Griffin Elinor Smith
by Jason Lutes ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 1, 2001
This black-and-white historical narrative, written and illustrated by Lutes, collects eight volumes of his ongoing comic book set in Berlin during the late ’20s. It’s a multilayered tale of love and politics at the beginning of the Nazi era, as Lutes follows the stories of three characters: a 20ish art student from the provinces, a textile worker, and a young Jewish radical. Their lives intersect in only the subtlest way—Lutes depicts them crossing paths at some great public events, such as the Mayday march that closes this part of his book. And Lutes plays with perspective in a visual sense as well, jumping from point-of-view frames to overhead angles, including one from a dirigible flying above in honor of the Kaiser. At street level, Lutes integrates his historical research smoothly, and cleverly evokes the sounds and smells of a city alive with public debate and private turmoil. The competing political factions include communists, socialists, democrats, nationalists, and fascists, and all of Lutes’s characters get swept up by events. Marthe, the beautiful art student, settles in with Kurt, the cynical and detached journalist; Gudrun, the factory worker, loses her job, and her nasty husband (to the Nazi party), then joins a communist cooperative with her young daughters; Schwartz, a teenager enamored with the memory of Rosa Luxembourg, balances his incipient politics with his religion at home and his passion for Houdini. The lesser figures seem fully realized as well, from the despotic art instructor to the reluctant street policeman. Cosmopolitan Berlin on the brink of disaster: Lutes captures the time and place with a historian’s precision and a cinematographer’s skill. His shifts from close-ups to fades work perfectly in his thin-line style, a crossbreed of dense-scene European comics and more simple comics styles on this side of the Atlantic.
An original project worth watching as it shapes up to something that may be quite magnificent.Pub Date: June 1, 2001
ISBN: 1-896597-29-7
Page Count: 212
Publisher: Drawn & Quarterly
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2001
Categories: GENERAL GRAPHIC NOVELS & COMICS
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by Jason Lutes & illustrated by Nick Bertozzi
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