A Review By: Amelia
If you’re a follower of Bookworms Unite you’ll know I’ve
posted about The Crow before: it’s my favourite comic and movie of all time.
Since the success of the first movie though, there’s been a plethora of sequels
hoping to cash in and, let’s face it, they’ve all been pretty subpar (I’m thinking of a much worse
word but I’m going to reframe from using it lest there are fans for the sequels
reading this). The Crow: Death and
Rebirth was a comic that I avoided for awhile thinking it was going to go
down the same road as the movie franchise, but when I found the complete
graphic novel half off at a book store, I thought why not? Surprisingly, I
wasn’t disappointed.
The Crow has been reborn: this time in Tokyo. Jamie Osterberg finds his life torn
apart when Haruko, his girlfriend, is kidnapped and somehow changed into a
different person. As he struggles to find out how and why he himself is killed.
Of course, he doesn’t stay dead. The Crow must once more make the wrong thing
right—but this time he might have to do it by killing the woman he loves the
most...
John Shirley is the author of more than a dozen books, most
in the cyberpunk or splatterpunk genre. He’s also written prequels and sequels
to videogames and movies including BioShock
and The Crow. He’s been the recipient
of the Horror Writers Association’s Bram Stoker Award and won the International
Horror Guild Award for his collection Black Butterflies. Shirley has also
fronted punk bands and written lyrics for his own music, as well as for Blue Oyster Cult and other groups. A
principal screenwriter for The Crow
movie starring Brandon Lee, Shirley now devotes most of his time to writing for
television and film.
The main characters of the piece are Jamie, an American
studying in Tokyo,
Haruko, his Japanese girlfriend, and the shadowy broad of directors at an
unsavoury multi-billion dollar corporation. Overall the cast of characters is
varied and interesting, but you learn very little about them throughout the
piece. In the original Crow you came
to know Shelly and Eric through numerous flashbacks until they felt like
characters you’d known all your life. Unfortunately with Jamie and Haruko, you
only get the opening of the graphic novel to learn about their relationship and
it really doesn’t seem as loving and amazing as Shelly and Eric’s. The same
goes with Jamie once he becomes the Crow. Jamie lacks the humanity that made
Eric such an interesting serial killing vigilante. It just makes what Jamie and
Haruko go through seem flat. It’s got life to it, but the life is a little
cookie cutter-esque.
The art style, like the writing style, in Death and Rebirth is a gritty and dark
style. It’s got sharp lines and shadowy, murky colours. Faces are minimalistic
and the landscape even more so. It’s an interesting choice since the piece
takes place in Tokyo
and there’s not an inch of that city that’s not covered in advertisements and
neon lights. All in all, the shadowy and dark colouring that’s featured in Death and Rebirth is on par with the
original Crow (of course the original
didn’t have colour, but that’s beside the point).
My final thoughts on The
Crow: Death and Rebirth are that it’s pretty good–it’s no where close to
the original because I’ll be damned if that wasn’t the most genuine thing I’ve
ever read!–but Death and Rebirth wasn’t
trying to be the original Crow (unlike all those horrible movie sequels that
tried to cash in on the original’s success). It was a revamp–a rebirth–of the franchise. Although it
didn’t hit every mark it attempted to hit, it was still an interesting take on
James O’Barr’s mythology. Death and
Rebirth has its own story with its
own themes and if you’re a Crow fan, it’s definitely worth looking into.
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