Kabuki

This page is for the comic book by David Mack. If you were looking for the form of theater see Kabuki Theater.



Kabuki is a comic book published by Marvel Comics, a weird comic book published by Marvel. Written and, for the most part, illustrated by David Mack. It reads more like an illustrated novel than anything else. Forgoing standard action panels with speach bubble in favor of heavily utilizing abstract pictures, poetry and Purple Prose. In addition to the normal drawings several photographs, photo-shopped photographs, sculptures, paintings, and sometimes even actual objects like flowers applied directly to the page, the artwork will catch a reader off guard. an example of the abstract pages Believe it or not you can actually tell what's going on when you read. Apparently, Mack also uses crayons. Though there are normal chapters written and drawn like any other comic, the more psychoanalytic arcs tend to use abstract artwork

The story itself is simple enough: a Cyberpunk setting in which a group of assassins, all of them female, work for a mysterious masked man. Think a Darker and Edgier Charlie's Angels. Our heroine is Kabuki, a girl whose mother was taken by the Japanese to serve as a comfort woman during World War II. However, she was sent to a general whose definition of comfort woman differed from the usual and instead of having them perform sex acts, he had them perform classic kabuki theater. The general's son wasn't happy with this: He raped and killed the general's wife, Kabuki's mother. And then he killed Kabuki herself, after carving the Japanese symbol for "kabuki" on the side of her face. She was officially dead for a only a few minutes. Fast forward a few years, and Kabuki is questioning exactly why the general trained her to be the greatest assassin to ever live.

In addition to the main Kabuki plot, we get a look into the other characters' lives.


 * Action Girl: All eight Noh agents
 * Cool Mask: All eight Noh agents wear painted porcelain masks when "in character".
 * Creepy Twins: The twin assassins collectively named Siamese are former Siamese twins who were joined at the shoulder, and given cybernetic arms when surgically separated. They're portrayed in a fairly creepy fashion; although they do get a sympathetic scene at one point in the series, it's somewhat negated by the fact that the left-handed one is busy sewing all her stuffed animals' mouths shut at the time.
 * Whip Sword: Used by Snapdragon.
 * Glass Eye:
 * MacGyvering: Kabuki can kill you with a cigarette, given a few minutes in a bathroom with a cigarette and whatever you have laying around she can make poison potent enough to kill you with one drop.
 * Dual-Wielding: Kabuki's scythes.
 * Cyberpunk with a Chance of Rain
 * Most Writers Are Writers:
 * Private Eye Monologue : "I feel the burning of thier gaze and it keeps me warm. I hold onto it and proceed. I find myself thinking of my sensie again...and of a little girl training her body to perform beyond built in psychological taboos. I think of this as I bite off my finger."
 * Reality Ensues: poor scarab...
 * Facing the Bullets One-Liner : "A voice in my head tells me the bullet had my name on it...I tell the voice they misspelled my name"
 * Warrior Poet - Pretty much everyone who has a speaking line
 * Yakuza: quite a few