Solo: The Survivors of Chaos

December 2, 2019
Martin, a Spanish cartoonist of European Disney and Tom & Jerry comics, delivers a warrior treatment of the latter in this saga of a burly muscled rodent fighting through a Mad Max–style world. Solo’s postapocalyptic landscape is populated with warring tribes of animals: scavenger weasels, devil dogs, shadowed black cats, and his own species, a tribe of intelligent, overgrown rats hiding in caves and reduced to a primitive society. These animals coexist uneasily with duplicitous humans, and Solo is rat-napped into an all-species gladiator games before finally finding the happiness and family the wanderer aches for. Martin’s art enlivens the survival story with an animated, cartoony style depicting wide-eyed anthropomorphized creatures. The fantastic anatomy of bipedal animals is smooth and natural, and with fluent, energetic tiered panels of fighting action. Muted but robust coloring depicts the tan and brown of an endless scorching desert, subtle grays and whites of a blizzard winter (occasionally splashed with scarlet blood), and black skies ripped with sharper grays on a rainy night. This is the first of Martin’s series of tales of warrior vermin translated for an English-reading audience, and his mythos holds the promise of standing alongside Stan Sakai’s Usagi Yojimbo or Kevin Eastman and Peter Laird’s original Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.

February 1, 2020

In a desolate postapocalyptic world where humans, monsters, and mutated animal people face a daily fight for survival, a young rat named Solo decides his parents and siblings will have a better chance of staying alive with one less mouth to feed and ventures out to fend for himself. As word of his prowess in battle spreads, Solo is captured by humans and forced to compete in savage gladiatorial combat against man and beast alike. As the years pass, Solo becomes legendarily undefeatable and eventually earns an opportunity to gain his freedom. All he has to do is win a free-for-all brawl against three vicious opponents and decide whether there's any point in fighting to survive in a world ruled by brutal violence. Warner Bros. Lifetime Achievement Award-winning cartoonist Martin illustrates Solo's adventures in a style reminiscent of the Tom and Jerry comics for which he's internationally acclaimed, lending a kinetic fluidity to gory action scenes and a sense of warmth despite the spiritual despondency and desolate setting. VERDICT A beautifully drawn, gripping action-adventure, coming-of-age story in which the protagonist must grapple with ferocious enemies and an existential crisis.

Copyright 2020 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.