Seven Sons Excels
Note the soft alliteration there in the post title; sometimes I impress myself, but enough navel-gazing. I wanted to write about the latest offering from Ait/PlanetLar. I heard about this project a while back, and it didn't interest me any. When I saw this book on my local comic book new release shelf it still didn't interest me any. When the book mysterious appeared at my home I knew I needed to at least give it an honest read and review it for all of you. Here's the thing, I may not like all of what Ait/PLanetLar publishes, but every once in a while a book comes out that I never thought to try and it knocks my socks off. Seven Sons delivers on that in more ways than one.
Seven Sons is an American retelling of the classic Chinese fable of seven brothers who outwit a mob who would have them die for a heroic tragedy. I was initially disinterested in the book based solely on the Riley Rossmo's art which seemed to me a bit garish, but when I sat down to read the book I discovered that the art takes its inspiration from calligraphy. Reading the book through that mindset revealed a stylish beauty in blacks and gray tones. The art style also includes an anime sense of framing a scene that works well in a modern retelling of the Chinese fable.
Seven Sons is set in the American West where our modern cities where built partly on the backs of Chinese immigrants. I was a bit worried that the book would gloss over the hazardous challenges many of the immigrants faced which included conscription, laws that stole their riches from them, racism, and other injustices. A tiny bit of this is addressed in the racism and quick judgment of the town mob, and since this is a fable and not a history lesson I did appreciate that the book was able to address this without being heavy-handed. The story works very much like a fable and so some of the situations the seven brothers find in themselves in are solved much in the same spirit of the original fable. Writer Alexander Grecian does a masterful job in the time period and I particularly liked framing the fable by book ending it in the modern day and setting. As an added bonus, and one that teachers should make note of, at the end of the book is a short essay which details the history of the Seven Brothers fable that is concise and lends itself well to language scaffolding. The essay may not mention it directly, but I'm reminded that Scott McCloud's Understanding Comics suggests that comics are a modern tool of myth-making so it was neat to see Seven Sons living up to that grand tradition.
So once again I become an apologist for Larry Young and his company Ait/PlanetLar. Alexander Grecian and Riley Rossmo have taken a concept that I initially had no interest in and have made me a fan. This is a book that will get multiple readings from me, that is IF I ever get it back from my wife and her class of students. This experiment continues as I hand this graphic novel over to my wife for her own reading and then she'll put it in her classroom to see what her students think of it. I'll be sure to report back later with their impressions, but for now I have to say that is a book that deserves to be picked up, read, and then passed along...and in doing so you too join the history of storytelling (just slightly different with the printing press now involved).