Battlewhales?
So let’s see: young woman falls through random hole in space-time and finds herself in a strange new world, where unusual creatures inform her she’s now possessed of great power and perhaps a mysterious destiny. Sounds like we’ve reviewed this one before, when you boil it down to the basics. “Antics” had a similar premise (only with two young women instead of one), but the execution of the concept in Kukuburi is vastly different.
The art is cleaner and more distinct, for instance. Ramon Perez has a clean, playful style – not ultra-realistic(the real world at the beginning of the story is absolutely exaggerated) but also not the stereotypical manga-ness we’ve recently been reviewing. In fact, Perez’s style really feels like a breath of fresh air. The vibrant colors don’t hurt either. Of course, the style really kicks into high gear when the story moves from the real world to the strange dimension, The Inbetween, the main character finds herself tossed into. The colors, if anything, get more vibrant, and shucked of the restraints of the real world, Perez’ sense of wonder breaks through – in the Inbetween there pretty much is endless horizon and no real up or down. He gets the chance to go wild with giant orange whales, deep red-and-black manta rays, and all manner of outlandish creature, including a valley full of sleeping giants.
Our main character, Nadia, is non-plussed – she assumes the giant orange space-whales, talking chameleon named Mr. Bojangles and little fuzzy “Meep” character are all something she’s dreaming. She learns quickly enough that it is not a dream, and that although she understands little of where she is, the threat against her is real and potent.
One of the things I enjoyed about Kukuburi is that Perez is crafting a novel, and to do that he occasionally has to pull focus away from Nadia and give it to seemingly secondary characters (L’Academie des Chapeaux on their battlewhale) and even tertiary characters (the Tillywump). Perez apologizes profusely in the author’s notes for the length of time in which Nadia’s fate is unknown, but he needn’t. Her absence builds a bit of suspense (she’s the lead character and we’re not really that many pages into the story, so there’s little doubt she’s alive) and allows other characters to grow (and allows for a bit of slapstick comic relief as well)
The art is wonderful, the story is just really ramping up into “exciting” territory. So like Delos usually does, I decided to take a trip into the cast and “about” pages to see what else I could learn. Not looking for spoilers but perhaps for fun background facts. This is the only place that my enthusiasm failed. On text heavy pages, Perez’ lack of an editor shows. There are lots of punctuation errors – every page has at least one instance of “it’s” being used where “its” should be, for instance. It made reading what should have been fun cast bios a bit of a chore. Perez’ author notes say he’s been busy lately with lots of personal stuff, but at some point I hope he gets a good grammar/punctuation editor to look those pages over and fix those little oversights.
Overall, Kukuburi gets 4 stars.
“Kukuburi”
by Ramon Perez
reviewed by Anthony R. Cardno
(4 votes, average: 3.75 out of 5)
Loading …
RSS feed for comments on this post. TrackBack URL
August 1st, 2008 at 12:40 pm
Oh, Anthony, you grammarian you.
(Um, on an unrelated note, you need to put those little accent thingies on “Ramón Pérez.” Also, some of the “s” are missing after your possessive apostrophe. Especially in the sentence, “On text heavy pages, Perez’ lack of an editor shows.”)
(Muhuhahahahaha….)
August 1st, 2008 at 6:15 pm
So you’re saying those of us living in stone houses should not throw glasses … *grin*
I, of course, noticed his punctuation problems because I suffer so badly from my own lack of an editor. That’s why my book has not one, but two editors — one I trust to find all the grammatical and punctuation mistakes, and one to point out the plot holes!
August 1st, 2008 at 10:22 pm
I must have been asleep at the switch. I happen to be a stickler for proper grammar and English, and yet I never noticed it at all.
Although, to be fair, I also never read the cast pages, or anything of the like, so that may explain it, right there!
August 1st, 2008 at 10:59 pm
I just chimed in to mention that it was a good point you made about Ramon’s sense of wonder.
(You grammarian guys can imagine the little squiggle marks in “Ramon,” since I don’t know how you do that.)
August 2nd, 2008 at 1:18 am
I’m NOT the only one who can’t figure out how to get Spanish squiggles (acute accents? tildes? )and German unlauts onto words! Yay!
August 2nd, 2008 at 10:18 am
Sense of wonder, perhaps, but still a bit much to swallow. How many people would stumble through a dimensional portal and only experience a brief second of disorientation? That’s what throws me about these comics - your brain would explode at the unreality of it. Suspension of disbelief only goes so far, doesn’t it?
August 2nd, 2008 at 12:39 pm
I would think that stepping into a place with ‘infinite down’ and no secure ground would be very unnerving, to say the least. It must be a dangerous place to live. Up to that point, though, there have been no solid story consequences to speak of. What can it hurt to check things out here? (Story-wise, not real life-wise.)
That unreal tone had a foundation to it, so it wasn’t totally unexpected. The way the art is done tells you to expect some exaggeration. The skull speech bubbles (in red!) are another clue that this is not going to solidly imitate real life. The way the story progresses does not dwell on exploring the gritty details but rather broad, fairy tale swoops of description.
You -could- make the case that Nadia is the mysterious Kukuburi, so she accepts it more easily than others might.
However, it seems like something in the story (probably before the gate) was jarring to your sense of disbelief. When she walked through that gate, my thought was “Okay, all bets are off. Anything can happen now.” That may have been a tipping point for you.
It only worked for me because the story style remained consistent - even during that transition. I wonder if this is all a dream or she’s actually somewhere else, although it leans toward another place.
August 2nd, 2008 at 12:44 pm
Then it boils down to individual preference, and the fact that I probably have a more linear mind than you do. I can accept that.