World Famous Comics: Metamorphosis (Kabuki, Book 5)
Metamorphosis (Kabuki, Book 5)
By: David Mack Publisher: Image Comics Average Rating: Binding: Paperback Label: Image Comics Number of Items: 1 Number of Pages: 280 Publication Date: October 31, 2001
Product Description: Image Comics offers the latest collection of David Mack's acclaimed Kabuki epic. The latest tale of the enigmatic assassin of the Noh. The book - which Mack says "represents my most diverse range of fully painted and mixed media artwork, and marks my most evolved work as a writer" - collects all nine painted issues of the recent series titled simply Kabuki. The story that sets the stage for the current "Alchemy" storyline returns to print! Featuring an introduction by BILL SIENKIEWICZ and an afterward by filmmaker JOHN SAYLES, this is the largest KABUKI collection yet and still one of the most sought after! Collects KABUKI #1-9.
Best of the Best! This graphic novel is the best of a David Mack's incredible Kabuki series. It contains the most beautiful, yet unusual art for a graphic novel while also following an intriguing story line that helps the reader see the world differently.
One of the best Graphic Novels ever!
I love the current Kabuki series from Marvel comics called KABUKI: The Alchemy. And Metamorphosis is the story that comes right before it.
It is absolutely incredible. Some of the best writing and covers so many ideas. Even articulating a very reosonable and sophisticated theory on one character's understanding of the meaning of life.
And it is actually 288 pages not 280. Including a full 9 issues from the complete story. It tells a complete story on its own, and is even more compelling how Metamorphosis and the current ALCHEMY compliment each other and unite to tell one larger story in continuity.
It elevates the graphic novel format to fine art and literature.
Compelling visual narrative The Kabuki series creates and sustains a visual intensity that has to be seen to be believed. If nothing else, the range of media is incredible - one image might contain watercolor, collage, lettering, and computer processing. The next might be three or four other media.
This is not a book to read once and put down. It deserves more than one reading, maybe many readings, to capture everything in this story. The plot itself is well done but ordinary. It's the imagery that can't be absorbed at one sitting, including lettering and private notes. These additional texts don't drive the story along the plot line. They do, however, sustain the mood and express the characters' inner experience of their situation. There is no clear dividing line between text and artwork, though.
Other artists may use experimental media and non-linear text as a substitute for technical skill. Mack uses the media to express his skill - his drawing is outstanding, and he clearly has a passion for figure.
I have many favorites among comics, each for different reasons. Mack's Kabuki is a favorite among my favorites.
Shatteringly beautiful art, mind-shattering innerlogue David Mack worries me. He's taken the art of drawing comics to a whole new genius dimension. Nobody else has ever welded story and image like this, with so many ways to express everything: museum-quality watercolors, perfect pencil drawings, spiraling text, doodles, origami, abstracts, traditional japanese inks. New ways to show movement, memory, fights. One fight is drawn in calligraphy on a sheet of music; another is laid out as a board game; another is caught in the blur of a black-and-white video camera shooting in the dark. All this, while his heroine is trapped in a mental asylum for former female spies and assassins.
Here's a warning: fans of action/adventure, this book is not for you: move on to the next Kabuki volume, Scarab. And if you've read Skin Deep and are waiting for the story to move on, you find yourself in a long, almost demented version of the previous book. Kabuki makes her padded cell into a cocoon and slowly, obsessively rehashes personal elements of identity. Her metamorphosis occurs gradually as she transcends her mistrust of herself and her fear and longing for her past, by accepting gifts from another inmate, discovering the beauty of her own acts and story, sharing herself with her enemy. But that's a terribly flat way to put it.
The way David Mack does it, he can wring your soul out by chiseling in layer after layer of philosophical questions answered in a variety of metaphors. He brings new meaning to the term, tortured writer, and very nearly locks himself down and his readers with him in the asylum. He narrowly escapes at the end of the book, but not until he's imprinted on your mind both the pain and uncommon beauty that genius, whatever form it takes, carves into people. Glad you made it out alive and well, David. Thank you and take care.
Kabuki: Metamorphosis Frankly, a piece of comicdom art-- a real groundbreaker. This graphic novel, and the whole Kabuki series, moves comics into areas that the genre should have been going for years-- namely, using the art form for one of the things it can do best-- telling a story visually. Mack's ability to bring together both the story itself, and _how_ that story is told into one, completely interdependent form is amazing. The full color paintings and ink drawings that Mack does are beautiful and visually compelling, and his use of the whole page (versus simple panel by panel exposition) is refreshing and well worth the time one can spend poring over a page looking for all his details. The story itself, a dark one of beautiful assassin "secret agents", is nether here nor there. However, what he does with that vehicle is mezmerizing. The depth of Kabuki's character is real, what she experiences internally is real, and the growth she moves through is real. Get it just to see what a graphic novel really can be-- an art form entirely its own, a merging of visual and literary mediums. Read it over and over to be awash in an obvious labor of love. Psychologically engaging, visually stunning. It's unlike any other comic I've seen yet-- transcends the comic genre, even as it moves the genre into a new level.
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