King
CityWritten and Illustrated by Brandon Graham
Published by Image, 2012
Graphic Novel, 424 pages
Reviewed
by Maia Kobabe
I
read King City for
the first time in February of last year. Although there were still
ten long months to go until the end of the year, I had no hesitation
in declaring it my favorite comic book discovery of 2013 the minute I
closed the cover. It has absolutely everything I want in a comic.
The
story opens with a shot of King City: part Tokyo, part Seattle, part
New York, this heavily graffiti-ed and demon-infested city is more
than just a setting. It has a personality as strong as any of the
characters. This is a city full of secrets and spies, hustlers,
panhandlers, assassins, aliens. Beneath its streets and tunnels are
sub-basements and sub-sub-basements, layered down into the darkness.
It doesn't matter how deep they are, Joe can break into them for the
right price. Joe has a cat and the cat is a weapon. More
specifically, the cat is Earthling J.J. Catingsworth the Third. He is
as deadly as he is adorable. Given a shot of cat juice Earthling can
do anything. He can swallow a key and spit out an exact copy; he can
be used as a periscope, a parachute or a hover-board; he can fire
darts, perform autopsies and translate languages. He can read, write
and play chess. Needless to say, Earthling is a very valuable ally.
At the start of the
book,
Joe has just
returned home to King City from California were he received his Cat
Master training and was partnered with Earthling. There are both
friends and enemies waiting to welcome his return. Joe's very first
job back in the city ends when a man with a black suit and skulls on
his fingernails knocks Joe off a moving train into the filthy water
of the bay. Next, Joe's buyer is murdered in an alley by a gang of
ninjas in owl masks. When Joe and the Cat search the body they find a
key hidden in the heel of his shoe to a secret spy hotel called
Nowhere. Also, the dead man's nipples are made of bone and his belly
button has teeth. That's King City for you.
As
wild and inventive as the plot is, the art matches it step for step.
Graham hand inks his pages, then scans the linework and tones
digitally. Nearly every page in the book is full bleed, making it
feel as if the details of the city spill outward beyond the
boundaries of what this book can hold. Many of the pages are straight
story telling, but there are also pages where Graham lets his mad
imagination take hold. One page of the book is a crossword puzzle,
each clue and answer related to the book's characters. When Joe and
two of his friends head off on three separate tasks, the next double
page spread opens up like a game board- each character's path marked
across the city in number squares.
Later on there is a map of California absolutely packed with puns- as a Bay Area native I was especially tickled to see the city by the bay renamed as Sham Francisco, Oakland as OK Land and Napa as Nada. Throughout the book there are informative sidebars letting you know the exact contents of someone's pockets. If I have one quibble, it would be the lettering. King City is digitally lettered, and I had no problems with it- until I compared in to the hand lettering of Graham's latest book Multiple Warheads. The digital lettering is perfectly adequate, but nothing compared to the warmth of his hand lettering.
Later on there is a map of California absolutely packed with puns- as a Bay Area native I was especially tickled to see the city by the bay renamed as Sham Francisco, Oakland as OK Land and Napa as Nada. Throughout the book there are informative sidebars letting you know the exact contents of someone's pockets. If I have one quibble, it would be the lettering. King City is digitally lettered, and I had no problems with it- until I compared in to the hand lettering of Graham's latest book Multiple Warheads. The digital lettering is perfectly adequate, but nothing compared to the warmth of his hand lettering.
