By
Ricky Burke
Created by Dean Koontz; Written by Queenie Chan & Dean Koontz; Illustrations by Queenie Chan
Del Rey, July 2008, $10.95
Manga’s hot, no doubt about it. Their graphic novels are a cultural phenomenon that’s spreading from one end of the globe to the other. Here in the states, young American’s can’t get enough. With each new character, plotline, and author, now being plucked from the New York Time’s bestseller list, the Manga franchise is a publishing gold mine, with no end in sight. I’ve got not beef with it. Great, why not, right? The more diversity we can bring to any art form all the better in my book. In Odd We Trust…right? Not.
Best-selling author Dean Koontz with his popular Odd Thomas series doesn’t make the transition smoothly. His premiere offering In Odd We Trust in collaboration with Chinese-Australian Original English-Language manga artist Queenie Chan of Del Rey Manga is an odd affair. The story about a ghost seeing flapjack flipping boy with a tough gun-totting girlfriend sure sounds the best of pulp fiction, but doesn’t translate well here at all. The artwork is, um, odd, kind of rough around the edges, and not very spectacular for a mystery yarn while the story is slow and foreseeable. With everyone from Christine Feehan (Dark Hunger) to Erin Hunter (Warriors) making the crossover from mainstream novel to manga, I’m betting it seemed a sure thing. Just like the LA movie industry, that thinks by assembling some of the hottest talents in the biz they’ve got themselves a blockbuster (dare I mention Cat Woman?) now that formula has been embraced by another playing field. Let’s hope this is just a glitch.
Seeing dead people and communing with Elvis–Awwww, thank you, thank you very much–isn’t the most original of quirks for a central character however. For young readers that haven’t had the chance to see Tony Scott and Quentin Tarantino’s guns ablazing True Roman, where our hero communes with Elvis (played by Val Kilmer) and of course M. Night Shyamalan’s The Sixth Sense of I see dead people fame, this must all sound very enticing on the back of a manga paperback. I just couldn’t dig all that much.
You do get over half a dozen written pages, a sort of teaser for the original Odd Thomas series by Dean Koontz, which was originally published in 2003. If you want to eliminate the peculiar art work and water-downed characters and go straight to the bestseller. And there’s an artist sketchbook, which shows Queenie Chan going from awful to worst, if that might turn you on, I dunno.
My favorite moment in Odd We Trust was when the ghost of Lyndon B. Johnson mooned our hero. That image set-off a whole series of internal dialogues about the dead ex-president that I enjoyed a helluva lot more than reading this mind-numbing thriller. I really laughed out loud. In fact, there our several gut busters throughout, although I’m not sure they were intended.
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