Monster Truck

If you’re ready to hop into your custom monster truck and travel back in time to the silver age of comics, when the world was a rainbow of colors (and zombies), then this is the title for you. Reading Monster Truck is a bit like reading Yuichi Yokoyama’s Garden, but with big trucks, bigger monsters, and a psychedelic color palette to boot. And like Yokoyama, English cartoonist Kane (Bulletproof Coffin) presents us with a work that is so much more than an exercise in visual incongruities. Monster Truck is, at its heart, an homage, and it reads like a work of poetry with American pop culture as its subject matter. Like any good poem, the work is surprising and allusive and dynamic. Kane’s illustrations are spectacular, not simply in their use of color but in the energy Kane generates from one scene to the next. He creates a surrealist visual narrative about children’s toys in which celebration never turns toward cynicism or social critique. Originally released to much acclaim as a limited edition in Britain in 2007, Monster Truck should have a similar impact on audiences across the pond. (Jan.)