Amazon.com Review
Artist Paul Pope continues to amaze readers with his bold, confident, fluid style. In this, his most concise and singular narrative since 1997's One-Trick Rip Off, he presents the life of the world's greatest escape artist, Escapo. Pope plays the mythic quality of the character to full effect, showing two distinct moments in the character's life: his struggle with death and his struggle with unrequited love. As written stories, these fables may seem simple. But the artwork holds such subtle expression that Escapo's small victories and minor losses will stay with you for some time. Not so subtle is his pop-star rhetoric that fills the first several pages of essays and articles. You'll find that this attitude--part Warhol, part Dali--infuses the whole work with a flavor of great confidence. It's no wonder The Village Voice said, "Pope's idiosyncratic style and methodology make him a unique figure, even among his most talented peers." --Jim Pascoe
From Publishers Weekly
A new graphic novel by a talented and original young American comics artist, this is an archetypal story about love, fear and the looming inevitability of death. The central character is a Houdini-like circus escape artist who enters and gets out of an ominous array of huge, deadly, beautifully imagined devices. Pope (The One Trick Rip-off) includes two variations on the story of the escape artist. In one, Escapo finds himself face to face with death in the form of a cackling, grimly persistent skeleton. In the other, the protagonist, overcome by his love for a beautiful woman utterly uninterested in him, considers submitting to his deadly props and being done with it all. Pope's combination of spare, allusively poignant prose; a hair-raising, dramatically gestural black-and-white drawing style (influenced by Pope's love of cartoonists Milton Caniff and Hugo Pratt, and of Japanese manga); and a thoroughly tongue-in-cheek view of Escapo's brand of inadvertent heroism allows him to unpretentiously juggle his grand themes. Pope has created an unusual kind of comic book hero here, a very reluctant fellow forced to confront both the futility of love and the possibility of his own melodramatic death. The book also includes an essay on Pope, another (short) fiction and an index to his other works.
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.
