Review: Djinn Tales: A Life Up Top

Review by David Ferguson

Art by Brian Naughton
Written by Brian Naughton

I had a chance to read this book over the summer but never actually got around to reviewing it. With it’s recent release on ComiXology, I have been given another chance to highlight it and give my opinion on it.

The story very much has a fairytale quality as it tells the story of a grasshopper who dreams of being a man. Not as an aspiration but as a memory it seems. It goes deeper than that as the story goes into the idea of the haves and have nots. I’ll have to wait for further volumes but it seems the djinn aspect of the story is just a vehicle that allows the creative team (this time Brian Naughton) to tell the particular tale they have in mind (a method famously employed by Neil Gaiman in a number of Sandman issues).

The art is definitely manga inspired and I was quite impressed by it. I’m not always a fan of that style but I liked Brian Naughton’s art. He has created a bunch of weird characters that easily sit together whether human or grasshopper and he manages to humanise them all as you feel their emotions pouring out of the page.

My only criticisms of the entire issue would be the occasional issue with how some of speech bubbles point to characters where, at first, it wasn’t always clear who was speaking and sometimes the lettering wasn’t clear due to the shading in the background. Minor things. Overall, a quirky little tale that I quite enjoyed but I enjoy the odd ones. I’m interested in seeing what is coming in the next volume from, what appears to be, a new creative team.