by David Mack
$4.95 from Image Comics
Here’s an odd little number.
In Stephen King’s oddly autobiographical *Misery*, King has his novelist character reflect on how surprised he was that his fans didn’t show much interest in the work that he did. They liked the Work, the characters and the world, and would ravenously demand more and more details to fill in the imaginary universe he had provided them, but he found that if he tried to answer a question by talking about putting the story together, or how he designed a character, their eyes would glaze over. No one wanted to look behind the curtain; few cared that there was one.
Maybe David Mack, creator of *Kabuki* has more intellectual fans, or maybe he isn’t as troubled by the prospect of fan ignorance as King seemed, but in *Kabuki: Reflections* Mack provides us with just that which King wished he could do: he pulls back the curtain to reveal just a glimpse of the work behind the Work.
*Kabuki: Reflections* is a small collection Mack put together, he said, because he kept getting letters asking about how he designs the painterly, erotic world of Kabuki, the story of a Chinese Assassin. (All the assassins have distinctive Kabuki paint on their faces; I suspected a Kiss fan and, voila, Mack has done Kiss and includes an illustration of the band.)
First, Mack includes a dreamy, painted *Kabuki* short story, in which the operative lies in jail waiting to be killed by any of her former friends and assassins. We meet them, one by one-- lithe women armed with shuriken, razor fans, even, in the case of "the Siamese," prosthetic arms.
Then, Mack provides an annotated sketchbook of sorts, including early concept drawings for all his characters, as well as other works, some of them multi-media, as Mack works with glues-together magazine pages as a canvas or decorates a pencil drawing with lace and paperclips. (He muses on the difference between paperclips and nails, and the relationships they provide between the things they draw together.)
Mack is a literate and eloquent writer as well as artist, and Mack has no fear about exposing his own feelings in his work. Included are two pages of what amounts to an illustrated journal, in which the artists finds himself haunted by Kabuki’s image hanging over him as he ponders whether his parents divorced because of money and whether Thalidomide in the womb affected his brain.
David Mack’s work is ethereal and compelling enough if all you look at is the finished product. Pick up *Kabuki: Reflections* to peel back a layer or two and see how it got there.