Old Souls

by Brian McDonald, Les McClaine (Illustrator)

Overview

From Brian McDonald and Les McClaine comes Old Souls, a supernatural graphic novel about addiction, obsession, and the things we do for family.

Chris Olsen has a good life. He has a regular job, a wife and daughter who love him, and a promising future. By any measure this is a good life, but it isn’t his first.

When a troubling encounter with a homeless man triggers something inside Chris, memories of his past lives bubble to the surface. A lost Chinese boy, a wailing grandmother, and a love so powerful it never left his soul—all compete for his attention.

Chris sinks deep into the seedy and seductive world of “grave robbers,” vagrants known for their ability to relive their former lives. But can he find closure to a tragic episode in his past without losing himself in the process?

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781626727328
Publisher:	First Second
Publication date:	06/25/2019
Pages:	256
Sales rank:	1,047,299
Product dimensions:	8.60(w) x 6.20(h) x 1.00(d)

About the Author

Brian McDonald has worked in film, television, and comic books for more than thirty years. He is the writer and director of the award-winning short film White Face, which aired on HBO. A sought-after lecturer and teacher, McDonald has worked as a speaker and story consultant for such clients such as Disney and Cirque du Soleil. His book Invisible Ink: A Practical Guide to Building Stories That Resonate is required reading at Pixar Animation Studio as well as several film studies programs. McDonald teaches for the Film School in Seattle and the Red Badge Project, which teaches veterans suffering from PTSD how to tell their stories.

Les McClaine has been drawing comics for over thirty years and doing it professionally for a little more than half that time. He is the Eisner-nominated author of “Johnny Crossbones,” “Life With Leslie,” “Repeat Until Death,” and “Highway 13.” He has worked as a paperboy, a librarian, a record store clerk, and a Santa wrangler. He lives in a little yellow house with his wife and cat and works in a studio at the top of a big building in Portland, Oregon.

Editorial Reviews

04/01/2019

A family man painfully relives past lives in this chilling supernatural thriller set in the contemporary Pacific Northwest. Chris Olsen works at a mall, where he generously buys lunch for a homeless man, Jack, who then claims that he’s Chris’s Chinese grandmother from a former life who lost hold of him during the Raid of Nanking. When Chris’s four-year-old daughter, Amy, also recalls she was someone else before—specifically a girl murdered at the age of seven, by her own father—Chris is jolted. After he dreams of being a child in China, he gets drawn into Jack’s cult of “Graverobbers,” homeless men who gather to vividly reexperience former lives (and deaths). The Buddha-like guru, Del, unlocks more of Chris’s buried memories (including an uncomfortably clichéd trip through the life of a repentant slave owner), while Jack begins to fear that his “grandson” is in danger of losing his current self to the past. The script by McDonald (Invisible Ink) is accentuated by clean, expressive black-and-white artwork by McClaine (The Middlemanseries), highlighted by a mono-color blue shading and spot black shadows that shock-change to bright white during traumatic scenes. An obvious moral is summed midway: “It’s death that allows us to appreciate our lives and not take things for granted.” This ghost story/time travel mash-up often leans toward the derivative, but the execution still serves up moments of visceral drama. (June)

Publishers Weekly

"Reincarnation is a perennial theme in literature, but it’s handled here with surprising twists and turns that reveal an emotional rawness that speaks directly to the human experience...With two industry veterans at the helm, it’s no surprise that this succeeds on every level." —Booklist

From the Publisher