An entertaining but not entirely faithful account of the movie legend.
An ambitious graphic novel takes on the life of Chinese American star Bruce Lee.
A twisting red dragon looms over the Golden Gate Bridge to mark Bruce Lee’s birth in San Francisco in 1940 before his family returns to Hong Kong soon after. Di Bartolo paints colorful, realistically styled panels, his account of Lee’s early life laced with frequent allusions to the Chinese zodiac. Concise narration and dialogue chronicle Lee’s experiences growing up in Hong Kong during the Japanese occupation and his many street fights as an adolescent. He also has an early movie career and eventually studies Wing Chun Kung Fu under revered master Yip Man. A brief overview covers his adult life in Seattle and Oakland before Lee lands his first movie deal. Here Di Bartolo relates the storied fight between an adult Lee and martial artist Wong Jack Man in Oakland. It unfolds like a scene from a kung fu movie, initiated by racial tension, but is a cinematic if oft-retold departure from the less-dramatic reality of a combination of Lee’s confrontational personality, several messages about a challenge, and weeks of planning. While readers may gain insight to the early years of the martial artist, this artistic liberty adds dramatic flair but flattens the complexity of Lee’s character.
An entertaining but not entirely faithful account of the movie legend. (Graphic biography. 11-14)Pub Date: Feb. 4, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-338-13412-4
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Scholastic
Review Posted Online: Oct. 22, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A neatly coherent account with tweaks that allow readers some emotional distance—but not enough to shrug off the war’s...
In the latest of his Hazardous Tales (One Dead Spy, 2012, etc.), Hale recaps World War I with an all-animal cast.
Any similarities to Art Spiegelman’s Maus are doubtless coincidental. Per established series formula, a frame tale finds the author’s more-renowned namesake holding off the hangman, Scheherazade-like, with tales from our country’s future history. In this volume, he covers the war’s prelude, precipitation, major campaigns and final winding down in small but reasonably easy-to-follow two-color panels. At the hangman’s request, narrator Hale both tucks in a few jokes and transforms the opposing armies into animal-headed soldiers—from Gallic roosters and British bulldogs to, as “eagle” was already taken by the Germans, American bunnies. Despite lightening the load in this manner and shying away from explicit brutality, Hale cogently conveys the mind-numbing scale of it all as well as the horrors of trench warfare. He presents with equal ease the strategic and tactical pictures, technological innovations from poison gas to tanks, and related developments such as the Russian Revolution. After the cease fire, which he attributes more to exhaustion than battlefield victory, he closes with a summary of the war’s human toll and geopolitical changes.
A neatly coherent account with tweaks that allow readers some emotional distance—but not enough to shrug off the war’s devastating cost and world-changing effects. (bibliography) (Graphic nonfiction. 11-13)Pub Date: May 13, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-4197-0808-4
Page Count: 128
Publisher: Amulet/Abrams
Review Posted Online: April 15, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2014
An unusually personal view of World War I’s early days, conveyed by new illustrations grafted to a French soldier’s chance-found diary.
Dated Aug. 3 to Sept. 5, 1914, the anonymous diary tersely records mustering, train rides, weary marches, efforts to scrounge up provisions and billeting, much digging of trenches, and advances and retreats under enemy artillery fire. Aside from occasional thoughts of family left behind, the writer’s observations are detached in tone—even gruesome sights of a human leg caught in a tree and heavily wounded patients in a hospital ward are only noted in passing. Along with portraying how he rescued the account from a pile of curbside rubbish, Barroux illustrates the diary with large panels of heavy-lined drawings made with butcher’s pencil and a pale yellow varnish wash. Most depict somber figures in uniform, drawn with geometrical noses that give them the look of puppets or mannequins, trudging through sheets of rain or sketched rural settings. The diary’s abrupt end leaves the writer wounded but complaining of boredom as he recuperates; the artist closes with sample pages from a handwritten album of songs found with the document. In a passionate introductory note, Michael Morpurgo invites readers to “weep” over these glimpses of war. American children, at least, may not shed many tears, but they should come away feeling closer to understanding what that century-old conflict must have been like to those who fought in it. (Graphic memoir. 11-14)
Pub Date: July 1, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-907912-39-9
Page Count: 96
Publisher: Phoenix/Trafalgar
Review Posted Online: May 3, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2014
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
