At Long Last: ‘Amulet,’ Volume 8

If you’re not familiar with Amulet, the all-ages graphic novel series by Kazu Kibuishi, you should ask yourself what you’ve been doing with your life.

Kibuishi was the mastermind behind the incredibly good Flight anthology, and he started Amulet—a grim but family-friendly science fiction/fantasy mashup—many, many moons ago. In fact, I first heard of the series back when I was closely following Jeff Smith, creator of Bone, so that should have been, oh, a good decade past. Indeed, the Wikipedia page indicates that the first volume made its appearance in 2008.

The story starts out as a deceptively simple fantasy-horror: after she watches her father die in an intensely depicted car accident, a young girl, her brother, and her widowed mother move to the country to fix up an old house—shortly before a tentacled monstrosity grabs the mother and drags her through a doorway in the basement, leading the two children into a hidden otherworld of magic, fantastic machines, and terror.

The story ranges across just about every genre as it moves from horror to fantasy to science fiction, with quirky robots, funny animal people, warlike elves, and humongous mecha battles, all depicted with whimsically cartoonish artwork offset by deliberately subdued, brooding colors. It keeps the reader guessing throughout.

Volume 7, Firelight, came out in 2016. It had a surprise ending, and Kibuishi promised that the eighth volume would be the grand finale. Then a lot of time passed, or maybe I was just impatient, and I was seriously wondering if the series would ever reach its conclusion. After all, the seventh volume ended with a new direction that was risky and possibly a bad idea, so it would not have surprised me if, at that point, Kibuishi had simply bogged down.

There’s also supposedly a movie in the works, though I would not be surprised if it has died in pre-development hell.

Well, something is happening: the eighth volume, Supernova, is now up for preorder on Amazon, with a release date of September 25.

I’m really pleased to see this series getting completed. With Amulet, Bone, and Cleopatra in Space, it seems that Scholastic publishes all my favorite English-language comics.