Ricky Rouse Has a Gun

Tittel, who has worked before mostly in movies, plays, and video games, emerges into comics with this zany, ambitious graphic novel about a divorced American veteran named Rick who’s living in China, away from his estranged ex-wife and his daughter, Florence. Rick gets fired from his job at a factory after an altercation, and has to find new work. Despite his belligerent, unpredictable personality, he ends up getting hired at an amusement park called Fengxian to play Ricky Rouse, a “Chinese original” that is really a creepy twist on Mickey Mouse. On Christmas Day, Rick’s daughter comes to visit from America with her mother and her mother’s boyfriend. The amusement park is taken over by a mysterious duck and Rambi—a combination of Bambi and Rambo—and Rick has to fight with everything he’s got to save his family and five hundred other innocent people. With art taken from the multipanel, fast-action superhero comic playbook, this aims to be a satire on copyright infringement and Chinese-American relations. At its best, it’s hyper, original, and fun, but occasionally the pitch gets too shrill, the violence too cartoonish, and events unfold much faster than they can be absorbed, or sometimes even understood. (Sept.)