![\"Veils\"](\"http:\/\/www.comicsreview.co.uk\/nowreadthis\/wp-content\/uploads\/2008\/04\/veils.jpg\")
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By Pat McGreal<\/strong>, Stephen John Phillips<\/strong>, Jos\u00c3\u00a9 Villarrubia<\/strong> & Rebecca Guay<\/strong> (Vertigo) Although at first glance more exercise than exposition, this undemanding and potentially prurient tale of the Seductive East is a very readable exercise in genre fiction. Victorian gentlewoman Vivian Pearse-Packard was late in marrying, and her husband is a ne’er-do-well wastrel. Her father-in-law has brought them with him as he resumes his post as British Consul to a Far Eastern Sultanate.<\/p>\n The new and exotic land is shocking to Vivian, and husband Harry remains a possessive and loveless beast, but her life changes when a visit to the Sultan’s Seraglio leads to a friendship with one of the ruler’s Odalisques. Vivian’s need for companionship draws her into the luxurious world but she becomes subtly aware of a hidden agenda among some of the women when she is told the ancient tale of Rosalind, a white woman who was stolen from her father and given to a Sultan, only to rise to be the second most powerful position in the land.<\/p>\n How the fable impacts on the increasingly desperate and repressed Englishwoman, and the choices she is subsequently compelled to make in her own life, provide a predictable but enjoyable new spin on a very clich\u00c3\u00a9d plot. Moreover the combination of Phillips stagy yet compelling photography, augmented by Villarrubia’s digital enhancement, imbues the tale with a static theatrical quality that verges on abstraction in places. Rebecca Guay provides classic pen-and-watercolour art for the sections involving Rosalind’s story, which imparts the strangest inversion as her contribution is warm, sensitive, deeply alive and approachable in contrast to the cold, distant and passionless fumetti.<\/p>\n All that aside, this is a worthy effort to escape the traditional boundaries of our medium and serves well as a bridge to the wider public.<\/p>\n \u00c2\u00a9 2001 Pat McGreal, Stephen John Phillips & Rebecca Guay. All Rights Reserved.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" By Pat McGreal, Stephen John Phillips, Jos\u00c3\u00a9 Villarrubia & Rebecca Guay (Vertigo) Hardback ISBN: 1-56389-752-0 Softcover ISBN: 978-1-56389-561-6 Although at first glance more exercise than exposition, this undemanding and potentially prurient tale of the Seductive East is a very readable exercise in genre fiction. Victorian gentlewoman Vivian Pearse-Packard was late in marrying, and her husband … <\/p>\n
\nHardback ISBN: 1-56389-752-0 Softcover ISBN: 978-1-56389-561-6<\/p>\n