‘The Complete Kabuki: 30th Anniversary Edition’ HC (review)

Written and Illustrated by David Mack
Published by Dark Horse Comics

I remember seeing “Local Artist Makes It Big” headlines when David Mack began working for Marvel Comics on Daredevil back in the late 1990s. He’s from the next town over, here in Kentucky. In fact, I’m told by the owner of our local comic book store that David and I used to chat and argue about comics back in the day despite the fact that I’m 15 years older than he is.

I ran into him at Mid-Ohio Con back in 2009 and told him that. Neither of us remember it but we had a great chat and he signed several issues of his indie comic, Kabuki, for me. I read them and they were fascinating but confusing. I kept thinking I’d almost need to read the whole series from the start for it to make any kind of real sense.

This brings us to 2025, and the 1320-page COMPLETE collection of Kabuki, from Dark Horse Comics, which is itself a thing of beauty. At that length it is, as you might well imagine, not a quick nor easy read, particularly since whole pages, and later entire sections, need to be scoured in detail to make sure one has picked up on everything being offered on them.

In the beginning, according to his own introduction, David was a mere 20 and trying to “learn the craft of visual storytelling” and “to work my early artistic influences out of my system.” To my eye, his earliest black and white pages are strongly reminiscent of Sanho Kim, a Korean artist for Charlton in the 1970s, and Gene Day, whose stunningly detailed artwork graced ten pages of Master of Kung-Fu just prior to his sadly early passing. There’s also some obvious Manga influence and some clear Frank Miller homages. Underneath it all, though, right from the beginning, one can see the early development.

In fact, David Mack developed his own unique style extremely quickly, à la Barry Windsor-Smith or Bill Sienkiewicz in earlier times. By the time we get to the painted color pages, with their endlessly creative usage of mixed media surrealism, you can’t help but know you’re witnessing the evolution of someone important. It’s still the same story, but it’s on an entirely different plane by that point.

And what is that story?

The title character is visually reminiscent of Marvel’s Madame Masque. She represents the Noh, an organization which runs things in a near-future Kyoto, Japan. She is the voice of the Noh, offering news and weather daily. The mask covering her scarred visage is the public face of the Noh. She is, however, also, a highly trained assassin for the Noh, one of numerous similar killer agents, all female.

We learn her background in great depth and how she came to be in her position. But then she is captured, stripped of her mask, and we spend a lot of time locked up with her in both her cell and her mind. During this time, our heroine learns that nothing is what she had been led to believe it was…including herself.

As engrossing as any prose novel I’ve ever read, it’s refreshing to have a book written and illustrated by a man that does not treat women as sex objects. While sex is not entirely avoided, nor certainly gory violence and abject torture, there is an underlying philosophical bent to the whole story, dealing with family issues, political maneuvering, friendships, betrayals, love, and loss.

After the genuinely stunning and gorgeous color pages, we drift back to black and white line art toward the end, albeit with a much more personal style by that point. Watching that evolution in order was almost as exciting as the story itself.

Toward the back, we get another brief Mack essay, some Winsor McCay parodies, and a very stylized and very personal final strip from David.

“Local Artist Makes It Big,” indeed! While I may not remember talking with David Mack about comics years ago, I’ll never forget what he learned about how to make them over the years, and I’ll never forget Kabuki.

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