Author: David Mack (no website available)
Publisher: Image Comics
Rating: WARTY!
I found this in the library, and a quick flip through the pages made it look interesting, so I took it and the companion volume home to read. I was very disappointed. Actually the companion volume was not bad if you thought of it as illustrated poetry which is how I decided to treat it, but this graphic novel was a complete mess.
It’s rooted in Japanese culture. According to Wikipedia, kabuki is a word made from three Japanese kanji characters (歌舞伎)which in English mean sing, dance, and skill, but the word itself may be more closely related to ‘kabuku’, which is taken to indicate what we in the west might term ‘experimental theater’. None of this has anything to do with the story being told in this graphic novel, however, which is more along the lines of Yakuza and gang activities.
I honestly can’t tell you what the story was really about because it was scrappy and disjointed, and it made no sense to me, so I quickly lost interest in it, but in the beginning we’re introduced to eight young, highly sexualized Japanese women who are evidently assassins, but who have western names, so the story already started downhill, yet managed to go further downhill from there.
Like is aid, by this time I’d pretty much lost interest, so I skimmed the rest of it, and I have to say that the art work, black and white line drawings for the most part, is really rather good, but then the creator had to offer something to make up for the fact that the tale-telling is sparse and far more like poetry than prose, yet it wasn’t improved for all that. It explained very little, and that’s why I gave it very little regard. I cannot recommend this.
