Author: David Mack (no website available)
Publisher: Image Comics
Rating: WARTY!
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.
This is a sequel to Kabuki Circle of Blood, a relatively long graphic novel which I did try to read, but which turned me off by its vague rambling sparsely-written text and a story which seemed to be going around in circles. This graphic novel I viewed differently, however. It is much shorter and is depicted in full color, and it's very well illustrated. It featured the woman who was badly wounded at the end of volume one, who now lay across her mother's grave marker, lost in reverie.
I decided to treat this as an illustrated poem, because it really wasn't a novel in any meaningful sense. Viewed in this way, I was able to enjoy it and this is why I am rating this positively despite having rated its predecessor negatively. The art work was beautiful. Much more effort had been put into this than had been expended on the first volume, which consisted, pretty much, of black and white sketches.
The story really doesn’t go anywhere, as I've indicated, but the art in Dreams was really well done, very true to life in some instances, while being much more abstract in others. There was something really appealing about it that I did not find in the first volume. It’s for this reason that I recommend this, and you might want to try it at the library before you decide if you want to buy it. There are many images from this series available online, too, so you can check them out there before you even decide if it’s even worth a trip to the library for this!
