Written and Illustrated by Kyle Starks
Published by Image Comics
Let me say right up front that there’s a chance I might have liked Kyle Starks’ new graphic novel, Old Head, a bit more if I were a sports fan…but I doubt it.
First of all, it threw me when this was drawn in that same style as so many children’s, tween, and teen graphic novels are drawn in these days. Old Head is most definitely NOT appropriate for young readers. It’s violent and has a large vocabulary of curse words and creatively vulgar descriptions of sex like I’ve never heard before. (I don’t get out much.)
The title, Old Head, seems odd for this type of book as it tells you nothing about what to expect but it actually has a double meaning, one of which seems a stretch even if it’s a real term, the other a bad pun, really.
The story is fairly well-paced but suffers from a lack of genuinely likable characters. It’s about a retired basketball player who has had a reputation for violence all through his life and career. We see a lot of that through the years before ending up in the present day as he and his daughter are off to his mother’s funeral.
After the funeral, he sells his mother’s house to the folks at the castle next door. The residents there are all perverts and/or demons who attempt to kill him and even go after his daughter. Turns out they all work for Count Dracula…who has for years existed simply as a preserved head after our hero’s mother chopped it off with a sword, as seen in an extended flashback.
This all leads to the rather obvious—SPOILER—usage of Drac’s head as a basketball as he’s dribbled for long pages toward a rather sudden happy (?) ending.
The best part of the book is the nearly 30-page flashback where the Count is still around. It’s gory and vulgar but has a few amusing points mostly missing from the rest of the book.
If you’re a sports fan—basketball in particular—and also happen to be a former monster kid, I suppose you might possibly kind of like Old Head.
For what it’s worth, I didn’t.
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