In Praise of Kibuishi's "Amulet"

My son, just like me, loves reading. He likes books of all kinds and all reading levels. Once at our local library (Billie Jean King in the house!) my son came to me and said, "Dad, you should read this. It's so good. I hear at least. let's get the first few of them..."

I shrugged and said, "Yes! What a wonderful way to bond with you, m'boy!" 

Um...not exactly, but after I sat with the first issue and read over the first few pages, I could tell the reading would be fast, and with the main character's dad dying in those first few pages, I thought, maybe it wouldn't be dreck.

And I can say, now after finishing all nine of the Scholastic published graphic novels, it is most certainly not dreck.

We follow Emily Hayes and her younger brother Navin as, after their dad dies in a car accident, they move with their mom to her great-great grandfather's rural house. Inside there turns out to be a ghost-like apparition that may or may not be nefarious, and the mom gets abducted by a bizarre animal and taken into a closet or wardrobe.

When the kids enter, there turns out to be an entire world sprawling out from the closet portal, and the kids get wrapped up in a series of adventures as they learn about their surroundings, and their destined place in those surroundings.

A series that touches on many genres---horror, thriller, heavy duty fantasy, philosophical introspection, and rounding out into sci fi---the creator Kazu Kibuishi mastered the art of the cliffhanger. Not necessarily in events always, but it story-aspects, major plot points often times are dropped a few pages from the end of the book, leading to a desire to grab the next book immediately to get some closure. Bravo, dude.

The publication dates are interesting when viewed as a whole, and we imagien a reader in the era of awaiting its new releases. These weren't comic books in the general Superman/Batman?Spiderman sense, these were smaller-dimensioned books of about 180+pages each, and they were released pretty rugularly for a while: Jan 2008; Sep 2009; Sep 2010; Sep 2011; Sep 2012; Aug 2014; Feb 2016; Sep 2018; and the final, 200+ page release was in February 2024, a wait of five-and-a-half years.

All said, the story is deep and iconoclastic, confident and angry at established norms that are hard to swallow, and, for the few melodramatic dialogue flourishes, the point the characters are making remains salient: you have to believe in one another and trust that people can change to actually make any changes.

I read pretty fast, I suppose, but each one of these takes, maybe, a half-hour to read. And when they're all at the library, the commitment of time time, money, and storage here at the apartment is low. Plus Cass and I got to gossip about the story? Priceless.

After that half-decade between #8 and #9, the fair question is: Did it stick the landing?

I won't spoil anything, but Kibuishi was bold enough to introduce a major new idea in that last book which kinda reshapes belief structures in their world.

Cass and I are monitoring the news that Netflix is getting into the Amulet business, as in they're working with Kazu on an upcoming project. We're excited for that, and hoping it actually comes to fruition.