Shutter

*Starred Review* When she's seven years old, Kate Kristopher's father takes her to the moon the first step in carrying on her family's legacy of exploring the vast realms of the imagination. Now 27, Kate is jaded and aimless, an Alice who's seen too much Wonderland. Worse yet, when she becomes the target of both a kidnapping and an assassination attempt, she is cast down a rabbit hole of painful family revelations. Keatinge and Del Duca have created a contemporary world that teems with casual miracles and feels all the more real and lived in for it. Crammed with the elements of children's storybooks, the art offers soft lines and a panoply of almost-recognizable storybook figures that honor those hallowed childhood recollections. This evocation makes Kate's adulthood disillusionment all the more poignant and gives Shutter an entertainingly subversive kick, though the deeper emotions never derail the sense of humor, wonder, and adventure. With a mixed-race heroine and a transsexual best friend, Shutter also displays a higher-than-average level of diversity, and that's not even counting the psychotically upbeat cat, the mustachioed robot, and the divorced and destitute worm. Fair warning, though: volume one ends right in the thick of the action.--Karp, Jesse Copyright 2015 Booklist

In this first volume of Shutter, Keatinge (Morbius: The Living Vampire) and artist del Duca deliver a postmodern adventure set in a contemporary fantasia that keeps the reader on their toes. At first the world in which the novel takes place resembles our own, but within the first five pages it becomes very clear that this is not the case. Main character Kate Kristopher is the only daughter of famed explorer Chris Kristopher, who follows in a venerated line of adventurers. Her childhood was fraught with Indiana Jones-style action and fantastic daring, but in her twenties, after her father's death, she has put it all behind her. This book finds Kate thrown precipitately back into her old life with the revelation of a dark family secret. Verdict The story by Keatinge is engaging to read, with a fully developed cast of well-rounded characters and settings that shift and incorporate fantastic elements in a dreamlike manner. Del Duca's artwork keeps pace, portraying all these facets magnificently in each panel. Wanderlost is a perfect example of Image Comics' commitment to independent comic book excellence.-Alger C. Newberry III, Genesee Dist. Lib., Flint, MI (c) Copyright 2014. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.