Kabuki Dreams by David Mack

Title: Kabuki Dreams
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!

Kabuki Circle of Blood by David Mack

Title: Kabuki Circle of Blood
Author: David Mack (no website available)
Publisher: Image Comics
Rating: WARTY!

I found this in the library, and a quick flip through the pages made it look interesting, so I took it and the companion volume home to read. I was very disappointed. Actually the companion volume was not bad if you thought of it as illustrated poetry which is how I decided to treat it, but this graphic novel was a complete mess.

It’s rooted in Japanese culture. 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, which is more along the lines of Yakuza and gang activities.

I honestly can’t tell you what the story was really about because it was scrappy and disjointed, and it made no sense to me, so I quickly lost interest in it, but in the beginning we’re introduced to eight young, highly sexualized Japanese women who are evidently assassins, but who have western names, so the story already started downhill, yet managed to go further downhill from there.

Like is aid, by this time I’d pretty much lost interest, so I skimmed the rest of it, and I have to say that the art work, black and white line drawings for the most part, is really rather good, but then the creator had to offer something to make up for the fact that the tale-telling is sparse and far more like poetry than prose, yet it wasn’t improved for all that. It explained very little, and that’s why I gave it very little regard. I cannot recommend this.