King City by Brandon Graham

I have been waiting a long time for the King City collection to be republished in its entirety by Image Comics.

Since I found out about it I have become a huge fan of Brandon Graham. His art is so unique and his his writing (chiefly in Prophet and his short story, The Voice from Dark Horse Presents) is exciting and fresh. 

So after what felt like a bajillion years (that is an actual number, ok?) I finally got my hands on the whole of King City in a nearly five hundred page tome of sheer, unfiltered, weapons grade A W E S O M E N E S S !

FULL DISCLOSURE: if you are looking for an impartial critique of King City you won't find one here!  it's fucking awesome!

Joe, our protagonist, is a Catmaster. Returning to King City after a 2 year hiatus at a training retreat with his cat, Earthling. He finds the city pretty much as he left it, full of criminal gangs, Sasquatch hotel proprietors and intrigue. Joe remarks:

'I heard that somewhere in this city they have the brains of Walt Disney and Theodore Roosevelt in jars....They take them out and put them in robotic spiders bodies to have them fight in an arena'

Early on we see what being a catmaster is all about. Earthling, Joe's adorable moggy, is one versatile kitty. A quick splash of 'cat juice' and Joe and Earthling can achieve just about anything. The first such instance features Joe copying a key for a shadowy client. He injects Earthling with some of the aforementioned 'cat juice' and Earthling copies the key by eating it and coughing it back up. As with Prophet Graham seems to revel in creating technology, magic, even types of food and drink. It gives King City a real lived in feel and adds a depth that feeds into the wider story. 

The city is the star of this comic, rendered in a dizzying fashion by Graham, there is so much detail packed into every panel and spread that when reading King City you can spend four or five times longer on each page just soaking up the intricacies woven in to the page. I swear down Brandon Graham is some sort of fucking pencil wizard. He knows when to pile on the detail but acts with great restraint, sometimes in the space of the same page, like so:

that is some serious manga x Lovecraftian monster action going on there!

Observe! The beautiful white expanse of the sky, dotted with tiny helicopters surrounding the squishy squid-monster and the amazingly detailed city-scape that spread out from the monster into the foreground. The road and the tunnel draw you right into the city, you can smell the exhaust fumes, the smog, you can feel the sunshine and if you listen hard enough you can hear the roaring of the scary big bad in the background! look how huge it is! 

Cityscapes aren't the only thing that Graham can draw really, really well. The denizens of King City are as diverse and colourful as the city they populate. Take our central cast of characters; Joe the slacker catmaster, his balaclava wearing best buddy Pete Taifighter (amazing name), Joe's ex-girlfriend Anna and her Chalk addicted, Korean Xombi war vet boyfriend Maximum Absolute (another amazing name). It's not just the central cast that stand out, every single person that is visible throughout the pages of King City is unique. Brandon Graham is a world builder, every level is created with equal love and care.

Joe and his cat, Earthling...

I have to mention how much attention Graham pays to the female characters within King City, far from rendering his female leads in the standard misogynist, pneumatic-chested fashion that you would typically find in a comic the ladies of King City are unique and sexy without being scantily clad and improbably proportioned. 

i realise this picture may render my above argument moot but it's my blog so go fuck yourself...

  
At the centre of this story is a beautifully executed ensemble cast, Joe and his aforementioned friends, ex-lovers, current lovers and fellow (incredibly fucking awesome) Catmaster brethren. The way Graham writes about relationships between people (relationships of all kinds) really touches me, he has such a deft understanding of how to convey the essence of an emotion with so little text. There is a scene where Joe is ruminating over a girl he has seen; 'that girl today, fucking sweet and sour' this conveys the excitement of meeting someone you are physically attracted to, but follows this with 'and then there's Anna out there somewhere, too much Anna on my brain today' which is so loaded with melancholy it's palpable. Really Graham excels in dialogue generally, peppering the story with puns and sly jokes and references to manga and films. 

so.fucking.awesome.

This comic is tremendous fun, it's bright and weird and sexy and sad and scary and exciting and cool and fun. At no point throughout King City does Graham bring anything other than his A-game. So much effort and time is written into the pages of this comic. Little things like this:

it's a King City board game! son of a bitch!

Yes, a King City board game! you can actually play it and everything! You don't get that with Spider-Man now do you?


There are also copious extra's in the back of the book. Covers of the original individual issues, short 'Omake' style comic strips by James Stokoe and Marian Churchland!


I can't recommend this book enough, seriously...why are you still sitting there?! Go and and buy it! 

and if you are still not convinced after this panel...you are offically dead to me!