wanted to like this more than I really did, Of course, that may have to do with the fact that I read it after I was supposed to be sleeping when I was sick and stressed.
But I couldn't quite make out a lot of the illustrations, I love the idea weaving various stories of espionage from WWII into one long narrative that connects, But I couldn't make out some of the pictures and thus lost out on some of the story, Also, many of the characters looked the same which I'm sure is appropriate for spying types, but I had a hard time keeping the characters straight.
Maybe if I'd concentrated more I would have followed it better,
Especially nice paired with the film "Charlotte Gray, " What strikes me most is how this GN manages to do what the very best spy novels do, which is to disorient the reader in complex and satisfying ways, and catch at the questions at the heart of spying who am I I agree w/ reviewer who states this works best as a singlesitting read.
This followup toSisters is just as intriguing and thoughtful, but perhaps with a more disjoint narrative than the prior book, It may just be a manner of opinion, admittedly, asSisters also had a nonlinear narrative flow but focused on fewer character threads, Super Spy turns up the espionage dial a few notches and presents us initially with discrete stories of different sorts of spies only for the interconnections between some of the threads revealed much later in the book.
The contrast ofSisters' seemingly more organic, streamofconsciousness flow versus Super Spy's distinct stories with beginnings and endings every time makes for a different reading experience.
I sorely regret owning the digital copy of the book in this case as it makes wanting to reference back to previous stories harder.
Plus there's the optional reading method of reading the stories in chronological order versus the author's intended publication order that I'll have to attempt one day once I figure out how to navigate easily via comiXology.
On the whole, this is an ambitious and powerful piece with a great story told in a format that is daring but may not be for everyone.
Vlastně vůbec nevím, Měl jsem za to, že sleduji více, či méně propojené příběhy spíš než jednu velkou událost, ale je dost možné, že mi to uniklo.
Což nejspíš vzhledem k vyprávění a k špionskému tématu, kde jsou všichni paranoidní a nikdo neví na čem je, dost pravděpodobně účel.
Mnohdy jsem si díky stylu kresby nespojil nějaké příběhy dohromady, Hodnotím tedy třemi, protože vůbec nevím,
Over the last couple decades it has been a popular ploy in fiction to attempt the creation of a single story through the use of a multitude of narrative points.
Novels will set forth what seem like a number of unrelated short stories thatonly when all finished and seen from the outsidecombine to form a single narrative thread.
Numerous protagonists will weave in and out of story focus, each propelling the fictive direction according to their own story needs but all the while vectoring the story itself down the authors intended path.
Its not an easy thing to accomplish, More often than not, authors of such works are only moderately successful in the endeavor, While once the inventiveness of even attempting such a kind of story may have been enough to earn accolades, now that the form is no longer all that experimental having been attempted over and again these last twenty years readers require skill as well as invention.
Many of these stories dont hold together quite as well as an author should like, their narrative paths not quite intersecting so well as they should.
Ive read many such books thatwhile showing promise from the starthave ultimately disappointed, Books whose final product failed to deliver with a compelling narrative force, Super Spy is not one of those books, While there are certainly a number of points in which Matt Kindts collection of WWIIera spy stories could have been better or more competently wrought, those are rare and in the end do little to diminish the work.
When I first approached Kindts book, I was not aware that he was weaving any sort of narrative tapestry, I thought Super Spy was merely a collection of short stories, It took the absorption of several stories before I came to realize that these stories were at all connected, It took several more to see that he was, through these disparate reflections, forging a single work, By books end, Kindt clearly and deftly presents his thesis: a portrait of the spy, a landscape of clandestine HUMINT,
Super Spy traverses the personal geography of the espionage circuit during the earlytomids, Touching on all manner of occupational involvement from statetrained agents to assassins for hire to citizens caught up in their national loyalties to those bound up in the war beneath the war due to coercions of one kind or another, Kindts book grants a broad perspective on just who might become involved in the game of secrets and how their experience would likely end up.
Several years ago I was doing research for a book I was intending to write, A book set in the world of spies and secrets, After reading fairly extensively in an encyclopedia devoted to espionage both trade and history, my story gradually weaned away from being at all related to spies and nations and evolved into something else.
Still, reading that much history of the craft leaves one with a certain perspective, Espionage is not glamourous. And more often than not, its practitioners come to bad ends, Espionage is, in reality, much more le Carré than it is Flemming, And Kindts work reflects this,
While certainly not all of his protagonists meet bitter conclusions, it is most often the case that their lives, if not destroyed physically by bullets, knives, or bombs, come to other tragic conclusions, twisted by sadness, loss, regret, or any other dozen of the psychological bugbears that plague those who traffic in lies and deceptions.
Super Spy, while occasionally humourous depending on the story, is generally a darker sort of work, It peers into the human spirit in a period of great distress, There is, after all, a war onand wars have ever been the destroyers of souls,
With few exceptions, Kindts stories are told without flaw, Art and word conspire together to craft unique narratives, each with purpose and goal, driving forward his story of secrets, Super Spys greatest strength doesnt lie in its inventive plotting or uncommon characterizations, Many of his stories seem lifted from other works Ive read or seen and most of his characters remain archetypical, The books strength instead lies in the very human way in which it approaches a world that is far beyond the coping mechanisms of its contributors.
These people, no matter how thinly sketched, are always
peopleare always worth the time of your consideration, They are just as sad, broken, and hopeful as real people are and when their stories end, those conclusions are just as stupid, pointless, and tragic as they would be in real life.
Super Spys strength may be in its verisimilitude: not technical but rather, perhaps, spiritual,
review courtesy of sitelinkGood Ok Bad I love Matt Kindt's work: His edgy art, his ambitious storytelling, the way he complicates things, challenges us.
Here he interweaves several narrative threads that link together in various interesting ways, Some of it was a little confusing as I sometimes mixed up characters as they looked similar, but this tale of WWII espionage is finally really cool.
I think it may be unfortunately titled, since it gives off the vibe of a children's bookeven the cover, which I love, could be sending you in that direction, but it is not that, really.
It's more sophisticated than that! The art makes the tale much more interesting shaded, shady, and it is overall a fascinating, multilayered read, Like the other Kindt book I've read, this one wants a second read, Lots of loose ends that mostly come together in the end, I really like his stuff, It's fine. As time goes on it has its moments but the outofsequence narrative didn't do anything for me and trying to read the "real order" in the front of the book in Comixology seems like a lot of work.
Kindt's art is better than the story, Each short story stands in its own as a compelling entry to the body of soy fiction, But where this book is genius is in how Kindt connects the stories to each other in multiple waysand the real reward goes to the reader who is willing to go back and put all the pieces together to get the whole story.
For more of my thoughts on Kindt, see my review ofStory, Like its namesake, Super Spy is a brilliant work of underappreciated genius that has been hiding in plain sight, How has this book flown so completely under my radar for so long
What begins as a fun WWIIera spy yarn rapidly grows into an unbelievably complex story of people eking out precarious lives as spies in the midst of wartime.
Trauma, desperation, distrust, violence, and horror are these characters starting points, From there, espionage becomes a means of ugly survival and coarse necessity, James Bond this is not,
And yet, somehow, the book still manages to hold onto that initial, joyful spark of espionage in its fascination with secret codes, doublecrosses, and surprise plot twists.
There is, for all of its unflinching depictions of wartime trauma, a childish joy and wonder in the cleverness of these people, What they each do to survive isnt merely necessary their acts of espionage are also beautiful and agile performances resembling the work of the best stage magicians and circus acrobats.
Matt Kindts range of visual techniques is just as masterful as the spycraft of his books characters, The way different timelines, characters, plots, and ideas overlap is absolutely jaw dropping, And some of the individual tales here would hold their own among the best shortform comics out there, “Mud,” “Channel,” and “Drop Out” now stand among my new favorite short comics,
Necessity is the mother of invention, and Kindts world of spies is nothing if not joyously and brilliantly inventive, But necessity is also, in the world of Super Spy, the child of destitution and hardship, In Super Spy, Matt Kindt blends the undeniable romance of midthcentury espionage with the similarly undeniable horrors that define life amidst the ruins of war.
Fantastic graphic novel emphasis on novel full of deception, paranoia, and heartbreak, The characters all interact with each other beautifully and the way the story lines weave between each other is very satisfying, Only complaint is that the characters can sometimes be hard to identify due to the art style, but hey, that might be the point.
This book is like a cross between Pulp Fiction and a world war spy movie, The book starts at the end and is then chopped up into different scenes so you would be forgiven becoming easily confused when reading the storyline.
I'm a bit biased because I recently fell deeply in love with Matt Kindt's Mind MGMT, The artwork, there's something about it, I can understand that it wouldn't be everyone's cup of tea and if you asked me to pick this up or Mind MGMToryears ago then I would probably have snubbed it, just because of the artwork.
I was used to DC comics, artwork that was all about bulging muscles, bulging breasts and perfect physiques, A tad shallow.
After reading more independent comics over the years it made me appreciate different flavours of artwork and that there shouldn't be a common style, but instead just a good flow.
That's was the artwork does for me, It tells the story clearly and it's quirky at the same time,
The story itself is confusing and I'll probably need to read it again, but the detail is extraordinary and ideas I wouldn't have dreamed of.
A fantastic story of a collection of spies and what they go through in order to make sacrifices for the war, Far superior to the first collection, with better stories and stronger art, Sen sa cio nal! Fragmentado como tudo do autor praticamente, mas com diversos pedaços que se encaixam dando uma sensação de que tudo está interligado.
Um ar noir soviete muito interessante, gostei bastante, o Lindt é um daqueles autores que nos faz perguntar o pq de ainda não ter sido publicado por aqui.
" Completely engrossing and very VERY interesting, This graphic novel deals with spies in WWII, And though it may not be clear within the first few stories, it becomes apparent that they're all interlinked, On the whole, I'm not much of a nonlinear novel reader, however, what Kindt does is brilliant for people like me, He gives you the option to choose, You can both read it in the order it's presented doubly intriguing and jumbled up OR read it in in order of dossier my brain likes this one more.
I read it first in the order presented and then went back, . . in both forms this book is outstanding, And whereas thend doesn't have the mystery and feel of loose assignments completely unlinked from each other, it does have a longer storyline where you see the connections a lot easier and readily.
Coupled with that are the beautiful and haunting illustrations, Each page feels like you're holding the dossier in your hand, Every detail of the characters is accounted for, So much so, that you couldn't actually tell these stories without the images, Something would absolutely be lost, .