King City

There is a marvelous, dirty, magical, extremely dangerous city in fiction and it lives in the mind of Brandon Graham. King City in not just a comic book, it is a conglomeration of genre, story, theme and art nicely bound up and selling at the low price of $19.99. In case you could not tell, I really enjoyed this book. At it's heart King City is a story about Joe, the Catmaster and his friends, Pete and Anna. Joe has recently returned to King City after journeys 'down south' and now needs to figure out where he fits into the place he had spent his youth. In the process he gets involved in a gang of human/owl hybrids, fights an avatar of the elder gods, laments over his ex, ogles every nice ass that passes in front of his eyes and adventures with his fellow 'catmasters.' There is an arc of fighting the ultimate evil and battling addiction of a drug that literal consumes ones body, but these aren't really important. The book really about the characters, letting you glimpse at three unique lives and their interrelationship. At the heart of the book there are the beautiful lines of Mr. Graham. He has a style that while reminiscent of manga stays uniquely his own. His characters express a wide range of emotion, every page is packed with detailed backgrounds and for the careful reader there is sometimes more text in the background than in the world bubbles. He forces the reader to study each page ensuring you are maximizing your experience. Each panel that Mr. Graham draws is a story unto itself. You find yourself wanting to know as much as you can about the crazy buildings and lumbering background characters. There are just glimpses of Echhhh Zu: Baby Eater of Shadowtown with its lair of white gold baby souls or corn cult looking to rule the world. Lines like, "The cat doesn't believe the the dark art of Popsicle," or " ... mudd astral projected himself through the back of a camel," make you want to detour out of the story you are locked into and dive down a different rabbit hole. Even after all this you still get to enjoy the hand drawn board game and the connect-the-dots puzzle. There is so much packed into this book that it would be impossible to capture in a short review. King City is a unique and fresh story. If you want to see what the comic medium is capable of, or you just want to read 500 pages of imagination gone wild, you need to read this book.

I first heard of Brandon Graham from the pages of Heavy Metal Magazine. He has an excellent style that is part graffiti, part Ninja Turtles, part anime and part video game. He is inspired by everything. If you follow his wordpress, twitter or tumblr you probably already know that. I've been reading the quality comic books by him and his friends since I found out about him. Prophet is another great comic by Brandon. His wife Marian does great comics too like Elephant Men, and his buddy James Stokoe does Orc Stain. The book itself is his Sgt. Peppers Lonely Hearts Club Band, it's his breakout work. The story is damn good, the art is damn good. He even had his graffiti artist friends do graffiti for the walls of his fictional metropolis. I love all the different characters, monsters, aliens, robots in this book. I love how Brandon makes little maps and shows you what's in the pockets of his characters' clothes. The topics they cover and hint upon are unique, fresh, and interesting. If you could compare the comic book industry to the movie industry, Brandon does not make corporate bullcrap, but his stuff is really good and worth a look. I like to think of him in much the same vein as Tarantino or Robert Rodriguez. Check out his book Multiple Warheads as well if you like this book, it is very similar.

Graham has skillz. I just wasn't crazy about the tone, a bit too much slacker whimsy. This is obviously more of a personal reader problem, than a talent problem. Graham fills the pages with lots of interesting details. A very nice (PAGE COUNT) value for a graphic novel, which bumps it up a star. I think it's a great book, just that Prophet is so great you might be a teensy tad underwhelmed by Graham's earliest work. That being said, the book definitely gets progressively better towards the end. A great example of an artist gaining skill over time.

I too bought this on a lark. Like some of the other reviewers, I was a little disappointed at first. The pacing seemed slow and the dialogue seemed purile. Had to put it down and pick back up a few times after a rest bit. At one point when I was feeling negative I was thinking i bought some silly kid book for adolescent stoners. I kept reminding myself I got this 400 page book for only 11 bucks and so what if i bought a stinker, right? As I kept going, things stabilized and I realized I had a uber-creative, zany, complicated, sophisticated tour de force in my hands. I was able to melt into this world and wrap my head around it. It took me to another reality. I think after another read, a lot more of the subtleties will come to me. There was character development in a way that could have become contrite and cliché, but the author didn't go that way. Kept it human and kept it real. There are tons of clever puns, funny ads, hilarious graffiti and laugh out loud product names all over the city. The art is remarkably detailed and rich. Cityscapes are mind blowing in detail. Grahams renderings of the female form are quite gripping (no pun intended) and the action is good as well. It is an adult book that I enjoyed a hell of a lot more than i thought I was, especially at first. My only complaint is that I felt the ending was kind of abrupt and anti-climactic. I will still give it 5 stars since it was a superbly imaginative book. Bravo!

This is a really great book that deserves much more attention. It's hard to summarize the plot, not because it it's all that hard to explain, but rather because the plot is really secondary to the wonderfully chaotic city it's set in, the surprisingly well-developed characters and the ever-present puns and word play. A very short summary is Joe is a catmaster robbing, stealing and grifting his way through King City, a chaotic future city where aliens, mutants, zombie war vets and ninjas share the streets. But as I said, the plot is almost beside the point, this is a book whose real strength is in the characters and setting. Writer-artist Brandon Graham gives each page more love and attention than some artists give a whole book. They are jam-packed with details, in-jokes, puns and flair. This is a book you have to reread just to catch all the subtle things you missed the first time. Despite the surreal setting the characters are well-grounded and feel like people you know. Yes, even the guy who uses his cat as a weapon, even Xombie War vet, all of them have strong realistic personalities. Graham's style is a bit cartoony but all of the characters look distinct and realistic. The only one close that I can think of is Katsuhiro (Akira) Otomo, Graham's King City at times feels like Otomo's Mega Tokyo on acid. This is really a delightful book and at just $20 a total steal. I highly recommend it for anyone looking for something new and cool in American comics.

The story in King City contains quite a few different genres like action, Kung Fu, Spy, Romance, Comedy and I'm sure there are a ton more in there. I loved this book, both story and art-wise. The art is cartoony, but incredibly dense, most pages containing highly rendered views of King City itself, alive with city dwellers in odd clothing, Graffiti, and billboards with advertisements featuring pretty hilarious puns. I picked this up after reading and loving Brandon Graham's Prophet from image comics, and there are little touches to his stories that are in both, that give the reader up close looks into his often strangely different but somehow relatable characters and environments. If you like Prophet, or the craziness of the city in books like Transmetropolitian, give this book a read. Especially for $10! You get a ton of amazing pages for that price (Though it is in black and white in case you were wondering).

This volume contains both book 1 and 2, the complete series. Which is a good thing. King City starts out amazing. I mean I haven't read anything that grabs you this fast and hard in a long time. Like Scott Pilgrim with cooler characters and setting. No description of something that sounds as silly as a highly trained Cat Master really does it justice. But that's book 1. In book 2 it loses a lot of it's emotional weight and direction. Tense situations and painful emotional weight of lost love just turns to a pun fest. I mean, the dialog in the second half of this compilation literally consists almost entirely of puns. It's clever, if a pun can ever be clever, but it's not great writing. And by the end the characters you were on the edge of your seat for, you don't really care what happens to them that much. It's not terrible either, though. And the first half alone makes it worth the purchase.

As an addicted graphic novel collector, I often order things for the thinnest of reasons-- a few choice words on the back promising an epic cyberpunk thrill ride, a cover with an amazing drawing of a guy sticking out his tongue, a cheap price with an intriguing title, because amazon threw it in my gold box, or just good ol' "f---, it's gonna go outta print!" This one was 400+ pages for a cheap price and had a floating ball of cats on the cover. It didn't disappoint. I don't even want to start trying to describe all of what's going on in this tome, so consider this a small color-review that should be cross checked with other reviews and the publisher description to give you the full picture. At first, I was cynical about the sheer amount of puns, quirky nouns, and the lovelorn 20-something protagonist...I got the impression that it was stretching for a patronizing "indie" feeling. I felt there were some funny hooks, like an all purpose cat tool, but didn't know if I could put up with it for long. Thankfully, this suspicious feeling went away quickly and I read ravenously through all of it over the next few hours. Without going into much detail, I can tell you the story develops into a dense and quirky sci-fi/spy/counter-culture romp, I got used to the vernacular, and the puns and wordplay and one-liners, whether by volume or cleverness or both, got to be a bit mind blowing. Here are some bullet points: --The art often invokes a manga-like feel, but it's certainly its own thing. The weird, futuristic city and its inhabitants are very nicely detailed; many pages are worthy of a "stop and closely inspect" graphic novel moment. --There are several stories going on all at once, following a few choice characters, all of whom are likable and have enough crazy stuff going on in their lives to keep the pages turning all night. The more I read, the more I cared about them and their stories. Whether the action was at a fever pitch or the characters were sitting around and talking while eating, I was never bored. --The details bring the city to life and make it its own character. I just wanted to know more about the world and its strange tidbits of history and was more than willing to go with whatever weird idea was thrown at me. It's a bit of a tall order for one's suspension of disbelief, but those who give it a little time and who also have a taste for fearlessly quirky writing will be rewarded. It manages to stay light hearted throughout, despite having some pretty serious and dangerous stories for the characters. Overall, it earned a place in my heart and I will definitely reread it. Like other reviews state, it's a bit difficult for me to go into much detail about it (read: i'm lazy), but it's cheap and huge and doesn't really have a dull moment...purchase without fear.

If you are a fan of original graphic novels, then read a synopsis of this. If it sounds even remotely interesting to you then buy it immediately. It's that good. A little difficult to give an idea of what to expect without giving things away, but there are elements of Manga, a writing style that's slightly hypnotic and soothing, a book that draws you in both with the writing and visuals as both evolve as you take the journey. A gloriously unique vision and execution. I'm happy I took a chance on this. It's big, too! Roughly twice the size of your average tpb. Maybe bigger. Brandon Graham for the win! King City for life! I hope he does a sequel...

A million details on each page. Lots of puns, amazing art. The story ends somewhat rapidly, but endings are hard anyways, and frankly I usually only like the beginning and middle part of any story. Brandon Graham is one of my favorite artists and I've read almost all of his work. He is very inventive. King City paired with Multiple Warheads is wonderful.

Die story ist etwas verrückt aber "Supergeil". ;-) Ich wünschte es gäbe mehr über King City oder die Cat Master zu lesen. Ich hoffe Brandon Graham vergisst King City nicht und bring irgendwann noch ein KC Comic.

Was unsure about this graphic novel until I bought it on whim. One of the best snap decisions I've made. The book has one the most interesting and fleshed wolds I've seen in a long time and in someways it more about the world than the protagonists themselves. It veers away from cliche story lines and make characters who are interesting and likeable, despite their humanising flaws. For me it has been one of my top reads and is a book that is only made better by constantly re-reading as there is always something you missed before. Cannot give this book enough credit.

Why haven't you bought this yet?