Twin Lotuses
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- 19,99 €
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- 19,99 €
Description de l’éditeur
Love is never lost . . . Fan is a young Chinese engineer who lost his wife in a Japanese bombing raid in 1937. Mingfeng was a popular performer at the local opera, and he is devastated by the loss. Distraught, he builds an extraordinary automaton that replaces her at the theater. Meanwhile, war rages throughout the city, and orphaned children run wild under the direction of local potentates in an attempt to thrive and survive. When those potentates take notice of the mysterious beauty, suspicions and desires start to grow. Mix in an American airman and the tensions of war, and things build to an explosive finale. Masterfully mixing a snapshot of war-torn China with the philosophical sci-fi questions of a Philip K. Dick novel, Twin Lotuses is a beautifully illustrated story capturing an ugly time and the flicker of hope, love, and ambition that shone through it all.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The sweeping English-language debut from Chinese creator Xiaoyu brings the florid, raucous spirit of Peking opera, with a touch of Frankenstein, to the comics page. In war-torn 1930s Yangtze, Western-educated scientist Fan Zhihuai toils away at the creation of a robot/puppet duplicate of his lost love, Mingfeng. He earns his keep at a streetside theater, where the artificial Mingfeng becomes a star dancer and performs so well that audiences think she's human. But Feng's creation attracts troublemakers, too, including a gang of foulmouthed street kids, a crime syndicate whose boss falls for the faux Mingfeng, and a cocky American soldier. The theater itself houses many more characters, with its bustling backstage of actors, musicians, acrobats, and impresarios. Soon the cast is dealing with murder and a missing head, and the plot has reached an operatic pitch even before the real Mingfeng shows up. Xiaoyu's ink-washed black-and-white art evokes the period setting with equal parts elegance, drama, and earthy humor. He works in marvelous period details, like the vendors selling peanut candy in the theater, and the story has the scope and spirit of opera: characters recite poetry, break into song, and invoke classic Chinese folk characters like the Monkey King or Green Serpent and White Serpent. Replete with action, melodrama, music, martial arts, and even science fiction, this show entertains in high style. Readers will be transported.
