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Kookaburra sittin’ in the ol’ gum tree…
By Xenix | March 20, 2008
It’s good when a comic gets a song stuck in your head, right?
Right?
Kukuburi is a fascinating little comic with a surrealistic bent. It seemed to carry that bent with it from page one, as we watch the start of Nadia’s day. It is never so bizarre that the audience gets completely lost, though. While I did spend a page or two going, “Huh?”, my confusion was always cleared up by the following page. I do like the multi-page updates, as well. They seem to allow an author to do those “huh?” pages and then immediately follow up with some explanation without leaving the reader hanging off the edge of a cliff.
The story is just beginning, but I find that it is a wonderful take on the surrealistic genre. Most comics either treat the surrealistic as exactly that and keep it at arm’s-length from the characters, while others might leap head-and-shoulders into the deep end of reality and possibly leave the audience floundering in their wake. Kukuburi takes the surreality (is that a word?) in stride, so while it is decidedly odd, it has a definite feel of the familiar, both through Mr. B’s sense of returning home and from Nadia’s belief that this whole mess is a dream.
I’m really looking forward to where the story is going, and I really love the use of symbols for swearing. I usually don’t, thinking of it as a cop-out, but with the style of Kukuburi, it fits! I think it helps that they usually come all by themselves and not in the middle of sentences. It serves as a lovely little exclamation point for a given scene.
The art is bright and vibrant, even when being dark and gloomy. It feels like a cell-shaded cartoon and the only really odd bit is that Mr. B seems to be so much more detailed than anything else in the comic. All of the Chapeau Brigadiers have a smooth lines and smooth shading lines and not much in the way of surface textures… and then Mr. B comes along with his rough-edged coloring, lip-wrinkles, and generally leathery skin.
Maybe I’m just reading more into things, but I like to think that this means that Mr. B is slightly more ‘real’ to the audience than everybody else is. Especially since we start off the comic from his perspective.
Kukuburi willingly drags a 4.5 out of 5 from me. It’s a little quirky, a lot of fun, and what can’t you love about a bubble-pipe-smoking, fez-wearing chameleon named Mr. Bojangles?
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