Word: burr
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...creature thought to bridge the evolution from fin to feet. And this week sees the re-appearance of another, less world-historical but still woefully forgotten "missing link" in the evolution of the graphic novel medium. Kings in Disguise (W.W. Norton; 184 pages; $17), by James Vance and Dan Burr, will finally be reprinted in an affordable, attractive and widely-available paperback edition. A remarkably sensitive and engrossing book from the late 1980s, when the medium got its first - short-lived - shot at mainstream appreciation, it remains, even 15 years later, a benchmark against which others in the genre...
...unusual and anomalous work in many ways, it remains unique in the oeuvre of both the writer (Vance) and artist (Burr), who never worked together again and neither of whom went on to produce much of anything even remotely as interesting. [Update: they are now working on a sequel, I am told.] Kings originates from Vance's days as a playwright of Depression-era, ash-can style dramas. Set in the early 1930s, the book follows the adventures of the 12-year-old Freddie Bloch, a working-class kid forced by circumstances to hit the railroad tracks of America...
...relationship finely tuned by changing its nature from the beginning - Freddie needs a mentor and Sam needs a purpose in his life - through the end, as Sam becomes increasingly ill from being on the road. The plausibility of this bond has as much to do with the artist Dan Burr's sensitive and realistic portrayal of the characters as much as Vance's sharp writing. Burr's black and white drawings are as powerful at depicting emotion as they are of depicting period and place...
...Though Kings has a political point of view, it never comes off as dogmatic. Vance is too dedicated to telling a good story and, helped by Burr's finely detailed characterizations, it never loses focus on interior lives of the central characters. It even occasionally breaks the verisimilitude for a dream sequence. By the end, Kings in Disguise delivers a heartwarming story set in a cold world...
...medium's lost treasures, James Vance and Dan Burr's Kings in Disguise is a graphic novel in the truest sense, creating a fictional world with strong characters, Great Themes and literary ambition. It deserves to be read by anyone with an interest in both history and great comix storytelling...