Mateki: The Magic Flute

Classical music meets classical Japanese art in famed illustrator Yoshitaka Amano’s adaptation of Mozart’s opera into this large-format book that stretches the definition of graphic novel far beyond its normal limits. Amano, who is probably best known among American comics fans for his work with Neil Gaiman on 2000’s Eisner Award-winning Sandman: The Dream Hunters, here melds the traditional tale of the magic flute with Japanese mythology to give us the story of Shaana’s musical battle with the forces of chaos, Yasha, to restore life to Shaana’s love, the beautiful Kouran. Amano’s art is amazing; it seems to move on the page in a musicality of ink so that the eternal tension between creation and destruction seem to dance.