It's unlikely that Kazu Kibuishi is very well known to most anyone. I only came across him accidentally a little over a year ago when the Waldenbooks in Anchorage were closing down and they were having a simultaneous 50% off sale and a buy one, get one free sale (Also known as the greatest deal ever). When that happened, I went a bit hog wild buying things, and one of the things I purchased was a collection of short sequential art stories...or more commonly known as comics...called Flight. It was collected by Kibuishi, and I thought it was fantastic and from there purchased the other two Flight collections (and the fourth when it came out as well).
Well, I never really got a good feel for Kazu's actual storytelling abilities as his stories were limited to about 10 pages in the entirety of those collections, but he recently came out with the first book of his new series, called Amulet. This is an absolutely wonderful tale about a family split apart by tragedy who is trying to get a new start when they get sucked into a crazy world of monsters and hyper intelligent robots. Sound weird? It is. But it feels very real and the characters are fantastic, and I really honestly cannot wait for the second book.
Kazu's art and storytelling really take a leap with this book, as with his series Copper he never really got to stretch artistically and storytelling was mainly limited to hijinks and tomfoolery. His covers for Flight were always gorgeous and expansive (which is why two of them are hanging on my walls as we speak) but with this, he gets to keep the personal nature of the former series while developing the expansive vistas explored on his covers. It really is quite incredible, and I fully expect it to be in development by some movie studio sooner rather than later. I just wanted to say hats off to Kazu Kibuishi for putting together such a stellar work.
And yes...it was in the children's section. Sue me.
1 comments:
I would say you are a "kid" at heart, think of it as a blessing;not a curse.
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