Duncan the wonder dog [Show one] [Show one] /

"I NEED a time machine," the leader of a terrorist group mutters midway through DUNCAN THE WONDER DOG (AdHouse, paper, $24.95). "Go back to Olduvai - flood it when there's still a chance." In this ambitious, beautiful, mystifying first graphic novel by Adam Hines, the unhinged villain has a better reason than most to wipe humanity from the earth: She's not human. She's a Barbary macaque who goes by the name Pompeii, and she's just set off a bomb at a California university. "Duncan the Wonder Dog" tweaks the old song into a provocative new question: What if we could walk with the animals, talk with the animals - and the animals fought back? This nearly 400-page volume is, according to its 26-year-old author, the first of a nine-book series. As with so many contemporary graphic novels, its high-concept story sounds like a movie pitch waiting to happen ("Dr. Dolittle" meets the Baader-Meinhof gang) - but in this case, the deliberate pace and embrace of elision discourage casual reading. In fact, the book feels less like a movie than the beginning of a knotty, ambitious television drama. Hines builds his world slowly, interrupting his narrative with oblique vignettes, wry parables and gorgeous landscapes. The titular wonder dog - a legend in the animal world who walks upright and has human hands - makes only a brief appearance. In the meantime, we meet Voltaire, a wealthy mandrill who lives with his human girlfriend and writes fiery opeds about animal welfare. Vollmann, the head of the federal agency in charge of animal-human relations, posits a link between Voltaire's shadowy Muir Industries and the terrorist activities of Orapost, the organization Pompeii leads along with Georgios, her fellow guerrilla, a gorilla. Hunting them is Jack Hammond, who years before cracked a case in which Orapost kidnapped a senator's baby daughter. If Hines manages to pull this series off, we'll be watching its plot twist and turn over the next who-knows-how-many years. (The second of nine volumes is not expected until 2014; at that rate, the series would finish in 2042.) But this is a major book all its own - not just because of its scope and scale, but because of the great skill and care that went into making it. Hines draws sharp, clear lines in pencil and ink, and interrupts traditional comics rhythm with vivid acrylics and jarring collages. Individual sequences shine: a climactic shootout gets a spooky visual treatment, as the ghosts of images from previous pages intrude on the frame - a canny illustration of the way time and memory warp in moments of violence. Hines's writing is as captivating as his artwork. He peppers the book with revelatory vignettes conveying the surprising ways this world is different from ours, as when a monkey calls a nature photographer a "perv" and shoos him away. One 34-page section uses the diary of a minor character to meditate movingly on the relationship between humans and their pets, as an aloof house cat stands up for her ill canine partner and demands better care. Long after finishing "Duncan the Wonder Dog," I thought back to a throwaway scene early in the book. A monkey sitting in a bar tells his friend the bartender a parable. Apparently, a bird in India, a black kite, felt an otherworldly connection to a red kite in Latvia. Scientists studied the two birds' flocks and determined that the black kite was lying. "Well some years passed," the monkey says, "and the colony of red kites went extinct, and the day the last red kite in Latvia died, the black kite died, too. Fell into the ocean, no one knows why." The monkey explains the story by pointing out a difference between animals' perception of the world and humans'. "You say to a human that the sun is either up or down," the monkey says, "and that human will nod his head in agreement. Two points of entry and you're done. But there are other points." After reading this big and bold comic, you may find a new way to look at your dog, your cat, the horse you rode in on. You may ask him: What are you up to? - DAN KOIS A graphic novel asks a provocative question: What if we could walk with the animals, talk with the animals - and the animals fought back?

Can this massive, brilliant graphic novel-supposedly the first of a nine-volume series-really be its creator's first published work? Apparently so, and Hines has instantly established himself as a cartoonist to be reckoned with. Duncan is set in a world almost exactly like ours, except that all animals can talk. Humans still have dominion over everything, and a lot of animals aren't too happy about it; they also see the world in very different ways from each other, and from people. The central plot of this volume is what happens after an animal-rights organization run by a deranged, bloodthirsty macaque detonates a bomb at a human college, but that's just a springboard for Hines to show off what he can do. Nearly every page has some kind of stunning visual set piece; Hines' range of black-and-white drawing styles incorporate clean-lined "bigfoot" cartooning, hyper-stylized abstract landscapes and near-photorealism, often on the same page. The book is an overwhelming assemblage of stories within stories, stories on top of stories (sometimes literally), and meticulously crafted anecdotes that aren't directly related to each other but add up to a portrait of a world whose desperate cruelties are more vivid when all its inhabitants can communicate with one another. (Nov.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.