Read McCarthy’s novel first to appreciate the subtlety of Larcenet’s superb graphic adaptation.
A suitably dark graphic treatment of McCarthy’s post-apocalyptic masterpiece.
French artist Larcenet delivers a full 21 frames before McCarthy’s main characters, a father and his preadolescent son, speak. That’s fitting: In the original novel, the father is grimly taciturn, while the boy is full of anxious questions: Are we the good guys in the piece? Are the bad guys going to eat us? Larcenet’s landscape is the dark, dead land of nuclear winter; in an afternote, he admits to liking snow, though atop every snowbank here, it seems, there’s a corpse. Larcenet’s rendering of the father looks nothing like the Viggo Mortensen of the film, for, as he writes in an afterword, “I’ve been racking my brain to avoid any reference to the movie adaptation.” Instead, the man looks like one of the hirsute Trumpets who stormed the Capitol. But then, so do all the other grown-ups, personal hygiene having fallen victim to the irradiated world of the future. McCarthy’s story is simple: The man and the boy have to head south to find a place they hope isn’t frozen solid. On the way, wheeling a shopping cart, they have to keep their few possessions safe from scavengers while avoiding gangs of roving, cannibalistic brigands. The son remembers a few hallmarks of the old world, praying that a dead family whose larder they’ve raided “are safe in heaven.” Dad, meanwhile, is full of more instructive notes: “You forget what you want to remember and you remember what you want to forget,” he remarks amid an endless landscape of tortured corpses and detached skulls. The story, as with McCarthy’s work in general, ends happily only if you count mere survival as a satisfying resolution. Larcenet’s brooding black-and-white drawings suit the original perfectly.
Read McCarthy’s novel first to appreciate the subtlety of Larcenet’s superb graphic adaptation.Pub Date: Sept. 17, 2024
ISBN: 9781419776779
Page Count: 160
Publisher: Abrams ComicArts
Review Posted Online: May 31, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2024
SEEN & HEARD
A clever and timely conversation on reclaiming identity and acknowledging one’s full worth.
Superman confronts racism and learns to accept himself with the help of new friends.
In this graphic-novel adaptation of the 1940s storyline entitled “The Clan of the Fiery Cross” from The Adventures of Superman radio show, readers are reintroduced to the hero who regularly saves the day but is unsure of himself and his origins. The story also focuses on Roberta Lee, a young Chinese girl. She and her family have just moved from Chinatown to Metropolis proper, and mixed feelings abound. Jimmy Olsen, Lois Lane’s colleague from the Daily Planet, takes a larger role here, befriending his new neighbors, the Lees. An altercation following racial slurs directed at Roberta’s brother after he joins the local baseball team escalates into an act of terrorism by the Klan of the Fiery Kross. What starts off as a run-of-the-mill superhero story then becomes a nuanced and personal exploration of the immigrant experience and blatant and internalized racism. Other main characters are White, but Black police inspector William Henderson fights his own battles against prejudice. Clean lines, less-saturated coloring, and character designs reminiscent of vintage comics help set the tone of this period piece while the varied panel cuts and action scenes give it a more modern sensibility. Cantonese dialogue is indicated through red speech bubbles; alien speech is in green.
A clever and timely conversation on reclaiming identity and acknowledging one’s full worth. (author’s note, bibliography) (Graphic fiction. 13-adult)Pub Date: May 12, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-77950-421-0
Page Count: 240
Publisher: DC
Review Posted Online: Feb. 29, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Captivating, frightening, and a singular achievement.
As Ireland devolves into a brutal police state, one woman tries to preserve her family in this stark fable.
For Eilish Stack, a molecular biologist living with her husband and four children in Dublin, life changes all at once and then slowly worsens beyond imagining. Two men appear at her door one night, agents of the new secret police, seeking her husband, Larry, a union official. Soon he is detained under the Emergency Powers Act recently pushed through by the new ruling party, and she cannot contact him. Eilish sees things shifting at work to those backing the ruling party. The state takes control of the press, the judiciary. Her oldest son receives a summons to military duty for the regime, and she tries to send him to Northern Ireland. He elects to join the rebel forces and soon she cannot contact him, either. His name and address appear in a newspaper ad listing people dodging military service. Eilish is coping with her father’s growing dementia, her teenage daughter’s depression, the vandalizing of her car and house. Then war comes to Dublin as the rebel forces close in on the city. Offered a chance to flee the country by her sister in Canada, Eilish can’t abandon hope for her husband’s and son’s returns. Lynch makes every step of this near-future nightmare as plausible as it is horrific by tightly focusing on Eilish, a smart, concerned woman facing terrible choices and losses. An exceptionally gifted writer, Lynch brings a compelling lyricism to her fears and despair while he marshals the details marking the collapse of democracy and the norms of daily life. His tonal control, psychological acuity, empathy, and bleakness recall Cormac McCarthy’s The Road (2006). And Eilish, his strong, resourceful, complete heroine, recalls the title character of Lynch’s excellent Irish-famine novel, Grace (2017).
Captivating, frightening, and a singular achievement.Pub Date: Dec. 5, 2023
ISBN: 9780802163011
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Atlantic Monthly
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2023
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