Rating: WORTHY!
I didn't like this one at all. It starts with an homage to Japanese filmmaker Akiro Kurasawa and ends the same way, these snippets book-ending a different story, supposed to reflect the Kurosawa story. The theme is supposed to be about overcoming loss, but that never came across to me, especially not with gaffes like me reading "He could breath an air of youth and freedom into his stories." it should have been "breathe an air."
After twelve pages of unappealing color glossy images, we went into abruptly from color and one art style to gray scale and different style, but the art work didn't appeal to me any more than the introductory style had. The book ended the same way. Neither story was very good. The book-ending one was a brief recap of Kurosawa's life, while the central story was about a family who were doing a really lousy job of coping with the loss of their son.
How do they cope? They go to Hawaii. How much do they miss their son? Well, when the husband falls asleep on the beach, the wife abandons him and her tiny young daughter to go shopping, ordering the daughter to keep an eye on dad! I can't imagine any grieving parent wanting to let their remaining child out of their sight, much less abandon them unsupervised on a beach. This turned me completely off the story, and even if it hadn't, the fact that the idiot child runs off would have.
Even if that hadn't, the appallingly condescending attitude towards Hawaiians would have. This author has every single character, no matter who they are, speaking some sort of absurd street gang lingo of the kind really bad movie makers have their black characters peak. The kid who the daughter runs into speaks it, a drug pusher he gets a ride with speaks it. His mom speaks it. His grandfather speaks it. The guy at the beach bar speaks it. I'm sorry but his was entirely inappropriate and insulting, and I flatly refuse to recommend this graphic novel.
