For the second time in the last week, I am regretting that I didn’t blog about a work as soon as I finished it. But the series in question is too good for me to completely ignore an excuse to write about it, and I did take a few notes right after I finished it, so:
Reading The Alchemy has done nothing to lessen my suspicion that the color volumes of Kabuki are the most beautiful comics in existence. This volume is perhaps less so than, say, the fifth volume, but that’s okay: its style fits in with this volume’s experimentation, the way it puts together sometimes simpler fragments in unexpected ways.
I’m not sure what I expected this volume to be like, but I’m quite sure I never would have imagined how it actually turned out. Which is good: the series could easily have fallen into a rut, as an action series about beautiful women fighting crime. Instead, it took a fairly large turn away from that; the main worry that I have now is that the series will go too far into megalomania, in the “grand theory of everything” direction.
Or maybe not; for all I know, this is going to be the last volume of the series. Which is fine with me; I have a hard time seeing how Kabuki’s story is going to develop further, and while I wouldn’t be against individual volumes about the other agents, I wouldn’t want to see that at the expense of the main story. Then again, David Mack clearly has more imagination about how to develop Kabuki’s story than I do; if more volumes do appear, I’ll be first in line to buy them. But if he decides to work on something else instead, that’s great too.
Anybody read any of his Daredevil volumes? Are they anywhere near as interesting or visually stunning as these ones?
Post Revisions:
This post has not been revised since publication.
Posts
I’ve read Mack’s Daredevil trades, and I’ve read two volumes of Kabuki, although I don’t know if I can adequately compare them. I didn’t think the first volume “Wake Up” did a good job of integrating Bendis story with Mack’s layout. From what I recall, Mack’s narrative storytelling is inseparable from his visual storytelling, and I didn’t think the Daredevil story really worked. His later volume, “Echo: Spirit Quest,” is much more traditional Mack, but it feels completely alien to the Marvel Universe. I was reading it as a Daredevil story, and in that respect it’s a failure, but I’m not sure how well it’ll hold up as a Mack story.
At one point I was planning to pick up all of Kabuki, but it was in that weird comics middle-ground–too arty to be fun, not arty enough to be serious–and I have such a collector’s mentality that I have a hard time just reading a story here and there. I think the volumes I have are from Image’s reprints, so if I’d have to deal with that if I went back and picked up where I left off (meaning I’d either have to have multiple publishers and trade dresses for the series or repurchase volumes I already own.)
4/15/2009 @ 5:47 pm
Thanks for the info – sounds like I should at least give Echo: Spirit Quest a try, then. And I completely sympathize with the annoyance of different publishers for different volumes in a series. :-)
4/17/2009 @ 7:44 pm