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Marvel Illustrated: The Jungle Book / Mandala
Posted 07 May 2007
Writer: Gil Kane, Mary Jo Duffy / Joe Infurnari
Artist: Gil Kane / Joe Infurnari
Publisher: [see review]
5.00 out of 5 Stars
Reviewed by Adam McGovern
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Marvel Illustrated: The Jungle Book
Scripter: Gil Kane, Mary Jo Duffy
Penciler: Gil Kane
Inker: P. Craig Russell
Colorist: Christie Scheele, Petra Goldberg
Cover: P. Craig Russell
Adapted From: The Jungle Book by Rudyard Kipling
Publisher: Marvel Comics
4.90 out of 5 stars
Mandala
Writer/Artist: Joe Infurnari
Publisher: In the Oven Press
5 out of 5 stars
Pop storytellers make myths, no matter how modern their time or
mass their audience, and two recent publications show very different
approaches by Western mythmakers to ancient Eastern subjects.
Like a trove of forgotten folklore itself, Marvel’s Jungle
Book collection opens the company’s new line of literary
adaptations by re-presenting a set of stories that rank with the
finest achievements of the era in which they passed almost without
notice. First instigated by former Marvel editor Roy Thomas in his
tireless campaign to expand his chosen adventure medium’s horizons and
remind it of its roots, four stories of a projected long-term series
ended up being produced in the early ’80s and stuck in Marvel
Fanfare.
“Mandala is rendered in
beautifully painted images that match the elegant intelligence of the
story’s composition.”
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The result, spearheaded solo by Thomas’ expected partner Gil Kane,
is some of the most immersively beautiful comic art you’ll ever see,
imaginatively colored by Christie Scheele and Petra Goldberg and
lushly inked by P. Craig Russell — the combination of Kane’s
scientific precision and Russell’s delicate intricacy was an inspired
idea that brought out the best in these two titans of 20th century
comics. The subject clearly captured Russell’s imagination, since the
four stories are interleaved with further illustrations (and a front
cover) he’s done throughout the decades after the series first saw
print.
This ain’t your Uncle Walt’s Jungle Book, with the brutal
beauty of Kipling’s original retained in a kind of primal ballet of
unsentimental yet lyrical survival struggle. Of course Kipling was
writing fables about the pecking order between Britain and occupied
India, and it can make for odd reading during America’s own current
colonial misadventures. But his parables about just rule and earned
power give insights into the psychology of empire and the strange
etiquette of strength that are illuminating if not enlightening.
For enlightenment, go to Joe Infurnari, the (hmmm) Canadian
writer/artist of Mandala, a fascinating, eloquently simple
story of life cycles that’s actually structured to be read in a cycle.
On a metaphysically familiar, geographically indistinct plain, we see
the lifetime of an infant and an elder unfold and overlap through the
agency of a godlike mechanical figure who seems to devour them while
they provide its inner humanity, each stage of the characters’ lives
hastening its end and seeding its renewal, like an eternally destroyed
and remade monastic sand painting.
The tale is told in single pictures that go halfway, on alternating
pages, to the back of the book, and then double backward to the front,
thus leading the reader in a circle and providing deftly paralleled
scenes on each spread, the life stages meeting each other as in
mystical revelation or scientific time-paradox. It’s all rendered in
beautifully painted images that match the elegant intelligence of the
story’s composition.
Modern myth will keep turning over on itself, but these two bends
in the trail are each important not to miss.
—CCdC—
Cover image used without explicit permission in accordance with the "Fair Use" provision of US copyright law.
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