The Raven

Who doesn’t love pop-up books? I always got a kick out of them as a kid, and today, while I don’t have the same sense of wonder I had back then, I think I appreciate the skill and imagination that goes into their design even more.

And who doesn’t love Edgar Allan Poe’s poem “The Raven”? Well, maybe not as many people as love pop-up books. But as I noted in an earlier review, it’s a poem I grew up with. So two childhood favourites came together for me here.

I wasn’t disappointed! There are seven spreads in total here, with the text of the poem concealed behind flaps. I actually took some pictures but when I looked at them they didn’t do the 3-D effect of the designs jumping out from the page justice. They looked flattened.

The art is by David Pelham (the design of the paper work) and Christopher Wormell (the drawing). They work really well together and they’ve chosen moments from the poem that rhyme with the action of the paper models popping up at you. So there’s the opening of a door, or a window, or a hand (to reveal a cameo of that rare and radiant maiden named Lenore). The wings of the raven also open up in a way that in a couple of spreads mimics the action in a sort of visual onomatopoeia.

Another thing I really liked about the art is its range. It goes from the close-up, like the aforementioned cameo, to the super-sized in the book’s final spread of the narrator’s castle. And actually that final spread mixes both, as you’re drawn into the model of the castle to peer deeper into the one room that’s lit, which you can (if you squint hard) peek inside to see the narrator lying on the floor with the shadow of the raven falling over him. Great stuff!

I don’t know how popular pop-up books are these days, or how many are being produced, but if there’s work of this quality being done I hope it’s a form we don’t lose.  You can’t put something like this on an e-reader, that’s for sure.

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Kill or Be Killed: Volume Four

A better end to this series than I was expecting. Not because it wraps everything up and answers all my questions, because it doesn’t, but because it went places I didn’t think it would go. I like surprises, especially when I’m not sold in the first place on a story’s trajectory.

As things kick off here Dylan, the red-masked avenger, is cooling his heels in a mental hospital. He seems to have escaped his demon, whatever the hell it was, and as things progress he’s come to accept the fact that he’s just a violent vigilante. Now where all that came from is anyone’s guess, because it doesn’t appear to be part of any family history. He does have family mental health issues but they seem mostly to be associated with depression. My own expert analysis is that he’s just a young man who’s angry at all the exploitation and injustice in the world. That gives him enough of a reason to raise hell.

Anyway, his murderous proclivities don’t go into abeyance in the hospital and soon he’s plotting the murder of a staffer who is sexually assaulting the patients. Meanwhile, on the outside, a copycat killer is at work, Dylan’s girlfriend Kira is still pining over him, and both the detective who has been hunting him and the Russian mob who want revenge are closing in.

There’s a bloody climax and then a bit of a twist at the end that provides a whimsical and not very satisfying answer as to how Dylan has been functioning as a narrator the way he has throughout the series. But by this point I don’t think a satisfying answer on that count was possible. Still, I thought Brubaker did his best, and Phillips came through with some nice snowy effects that give the mental hospital scenes a suitably muffled and wintery feel, a correlative to Dylan’s confused mental state. Another plus was the fact that Kira doesn’t feature as much in this volume except at the end, where she’s made to carry too much weight with regard to the vigilante theme. This seems to arise naturally from a decayed urban environment that summons and I guess empowers what are personal demons.

An interesting series then, but one I didn’t love because of the unbelievable and unlikeable main character, the just as unbelievable love interest, and the strained plot machinery, which really creaks throughout. It’s quite readable though and the action is well handled in all regards. I’ve heard rumours it may be made into a cable series, which sounds about right. It might even work better that way.

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MAD Book of Almost Superheroes

MAD Magazine specialized in satire, or sending up established material. So movies and TV shows. The media, mainly because they loved doing ad parodies. Political figures. That sort of thing.

I’ve previously looked at their take-offs of famous detectives. This book, written and illustrated by Don “Duck” Edwing, does something similar with superheroes. Some of these also-rans are parodies of recognizable heroes – Ms. Wonder Blunder, Fat Bat, The Macho Hunk, Superdud – while others are new inventions. Or at least they seemed like new inventions to me as I couldn’t identify any originals. In this latter camp we get Captain Trivial (“The superhero for the minor annoyances!”), Ragoo of the Jungle (“The gourmet of all comicdom!”), and The Masked Bernard (“Follow the adventures of this wonder dog of the mountain tops in his never-ending search for a fire hydrant!”).

The humour is that of the gag, running for three or four pages with a quick set-up and then a punchline. Aside from the long Ms. Wonder Blunder story, which is also the weakest piece in the book, that’s how everything is presented here. There’s a breathless structure to it, with each new gag being introduced by a quick bit of table-setting: “Meanwhile . . .” “As you remember . . .” “Suddenly . . .” “Later . . .” Different plot lines are adverted to, but they’re left unexplained. The Blue Blowfish is trying to save Buddy and Sue from being turned into jumbo shrimp, or anchovies, or French fries by Doctor Froglips, and I guess he’s successful some of the time, though we never see any of these other characters. It’s always just on to the next gag. You flip through a book like this in a single sitting, and I mean that in a good way. I don’t think I laughed out loud, but I had a goofy smile on my face through all of it.

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