Mondo Urbano

Last year was a great year for Best Book You Didn’t Read… and this year is already off to a great start with a brand new Best Book You Didn’t Read day!  There is no better way to enjoy a Sunday then reading about a book that you might have missed, then going to the store to buy it, then going home and reading it!

So, to start the new year off right, I read Mondo Urbano which was written & drawn by Rafael Albuquerque, Mateus Santolouco, & Eduardo Medeiros, and published by Oni Press.

Mondo Urbano is the story about a group of friends going to a concert, the story about the band  they are going to see, and the story about a guitar that may, or may not, be an instrument of the devil!  Oh yeah, there are a couple of drug dealers floating around too.

Mondo Urbano is a collaborative effort between the creators.  I’m not positive but it seems that the creators agreed upon a central plot and characters, and then started telling the story.  Each writer/artist created a vignette of 5-6 pages and then handed the pages, plot outline, or something to the next writer/artist who built upon what was already done and moved the story ahead.  This rotation lead to some characters appearing and then just as quickly disappearing, but it also lead to some great twists that I wasn’t expecting.

For a story that starts simply enough about a satanic guitar, the book quickly develops a couple of subplots about the characters.  There are numerous characters and each is given a little bit of time in the spotlight to establish motivation.  The guitar plot was interesting but I found I cared more about the people and the real world things that they were involved in.  It’s a testament to the skill of the authors to make the characters interesting in the limited amount of pages they had.

The story successfully manages to fuse disparate genres far better than I would have thought.  One plot involves one of the guys coming to grips with the fact that his girlfriend cheated on him, another involves the band trying to come to grips with the death of one of their own in a very Nirvana-ish way, and of course there is the ever present satanic guitar. 

Overall the story manages to have some humor, some moments about people being people, and some genuinely creepy moments too.  It’s an awful lot in one book but it works.

The art in this book is just fantastic.  Rafael Albuquerque is the current artist on the Vertigo series American Vampire, Eduardo Medeiros can be seen in Mad Magazine, and Mateus Santolouco has worked on Wolverine.  Even though each artist has a different style, the styles mesh perfectly as each creator uses his style to tell a story that suits his strengths.  The characters change size and shape depending on the current artist but I was always able to distinguish who was who.  No small feat in a book like this. 

Mondo Urbano is one of those rare books that manages to mesh different styles of art and story into one cohesive book.  If you are looking for a good book with a little bit of everything, then this is the book for you.