I cried like a pathetic little baby. I'm loathe to admit that it's not terribly hard to make me cry, but this was different. This book could wring tears from a stone. It confronts our deepest childhood fears with such compassion and bravery and...it's quite possibly going to make me cry again even though I finished it three days ago.I Kill Giants is about Barbara, a singularly idiosyncratic 10 year old leading a fairly unremarkable life, at least for a precocious 5th-grade hardass, aside from her preparing for a battle with an unknown giant. You're never quite sure about the giants being literal or metaphorical until the very end, but along the way, Barbara handles her inept caregiver/older sister, an extremely tenacious bully, and the interest of a new school psychologist with the type of wit and strength of character that instantly endeared her to me. She's intelligent, resourceful, independent, and delightfully sarcastic - but also arrogant, inflexible, extremely sensitive, and rather wrathful. In short, she's real.I often mention the artwork in my reviews of graphic novels, usually as a brief note to my review of the story. Here is the rare graphic novel that absolutely could not be told, with the same depth and gravity, in a regular novel format. The art is less beautiful than it is extremely effective at maintaining a mood - childlike yet hazily sinister - throughout the story, which is a vastly superior compliment in my book. I'm not sure that those unaccustomed to graphic novels would really get it, but in the absence of sensory detail or involved descriptions where you can bust out your mood-creating adjectives, artwork provides the opportunity for a writer to establish and manipulate those elements. I Kill Giants is one of the best marriages of writing and artwork that I've seen. The moment i started reading this book i was full on prejudice because of the "oriental" (manga-style) drawings. I was a fool. This book deserved 5.5 stars.This collection (issues #1-7) is a masterpiece, a short "one-shot" story that everyone should read. It is amazing how Joe Kelly (inspired by his own daughter and father), could compose a story that beautiful and complex in feelings, with simple characters with their own casual lifes.I wish my english was better so that i could express the way i've felt about reading this.
