Style
Unlike most comic series, the plot of Kabuki moves very little over the course of the volumes. Very little fast-paced or violent action takes place. Instead, most of the focus is on memories, dreams, thoughts and philosophy. David Mack's characters, especially Kabuki herself, revisit the same scenes and memories many times, rethinking them and their significance. Mack uses myriad art styles, not only pencil, ink, and color, but paint, magazine clippings, manga scans, and crayons. In Kabuki: The Alchemy especially, many of the pages are photos (or color scans) of collages using a variety of materials; for example, the fingers of Japanese sandalwood fans become the borders of the comic panels. Imagery is very important and prominent in the series; Mack reuses the same images, often changing them slightly, and focusing on the emotional content of images and the power of memories.
In Kabuki: Masks of the Noh, a different artist was assigned to each agent as a way of visually representing their personalities. This continued in Kabuki: Scarab, which was written by Mack with art by Rick Mays, who had previously drawn Scarab in Masks of the Noh.
Read more about this topic: Kabuki (comics)
Famous quotes containing the word style:
“No change in musical style will survive unless it is accompanied by a change in clothing style. Rock is to dress up to.”
—Frank Zappa (1940–1994)
“Switzerland is a small, steep country, much more up and down than sideways, and is all stuck over with large brown hotels built on the cuckoo clock style of architecture.”
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“Compare the history of the novel to that of rock ‘n’ roll. Both started out a minority taste, became a mass taste, and then splintered into several subgenres. Both have been the typical cultural expressions of classes and epochs. Both started out aggressively fighting for their share of attention, novels attacking the drama, the tract, and the poem, rock attacking jazz and pop and rolling over classical music.”
—W. T. Lhamon, U.S. educator, critic. “Material Differences,” Deliberate Speed: The Origins of a Cultural Style in the American 1950s, Smithsonian (1990)