Interesting idea, but not great execution. It's very wordy at times, and I'm uncomfortable with some of the racial stereotypes that are presented. There's a lot of repetition (which plays into the theme, I guess), but not much growth.

Overall, I liked Old Souls, a graphic novel about a man that starts to remember his past lives and re-experiencing the trauma from those lives.

I liked the premise of this graphic novel, but didn't like the execution as it did not seem like a fully formed and asked to sympathize with those I don't think deserve it.

An intense and immersive read about the dangers of remembering one's past lives. I highly recommend this read if you're looking for something dark and gritty.

Really cool premise but the execution lacked. More tell than show. The art and color use are excellent for the tone and helped the story a bit but overall a dissatisfying read.

Old Souls
Written by Brian McDonald
Illustrate by Les McLaine
First Second

I think the reason I never warmed up to the idea of reincarnation as a spiritual belief worth having — and I say that with the caveat that I don’t really have spiritual beliefs — is that, as a kid, there seemed to be a lot of cheesy horror about it. Cheesy now. To a kid who only encountered the ads, it all seemed terrifying, as if finding out you were reincarnated would only lead to horrifying difficulty in your life and it was best to never have that knowledge. If you had an itch you could not scratch, best to just learn to live with it and not ask where that itch came from.

Four decades later and Old Souls isn’t doing anything to change my mind. The old lessons still seem to apply.

When the story opens, it’s in the middle of a traumatic event at a mall, with a parent frantically looking for his lost child. As it turns out, it’s not this specific story or this specific character that is at the center of Old Souls, but the rather some of the ideas it portrays — the separation of families, the mission of a parent to protect a child.

It’s during this that we meet Chris, who works at an electronics store. Chris is a pretty normal white guy, has a wife and a daughter, they’re saving up for a house, but his world is about to change. He’s struck up a casual friendship with a homeless guy who lurks around the mall food court, buying him lunch every day. Its a compulsion that Chris can’t quite explain, but his young daughter’s memories of a different life begins to sparks some mysterious images in Chris’ own mind that leads him to open up more to the homeless man and down a path of obsession that leads him straight into the face of trauma during one of his lives.

Old Souls

For Chris, the obsession and the trauma create a spiral, the direct result of racism in the past, when Chris was a purveyor of systematic racism. The grim lesson he learned in that life comes with great personal cost that consumes his current life.

Memory is a way that we honor ourselves by focusing on the good things we have done — or, at least, the things that make us happy. But it’s also the way we punish ourselves when we fixate on incidents that cement themselves as trauma in our psyche. But there’s a third way, though it sometimes feels it’s a rare one — the memories that we try to push away of guilt.

The way memory works is, the more you go over an event in your head, the easier you remember the details over the years. But sometimes what you call memories are really adjustments to what actually happened. The memories that cause guilt — or at least represent something you did that are undeniably wrong — are often skirted over, and so the details of the actual circumstances dissipate or are reframed through your brain’s reconstruction of the fractured pieces. I think that’s what happens a lot these days when someone brings up an incident or statement from years ago as an indictment of the person now — whether it’s right or wrong, it’s always up against the way human emotion and human memory conspire to create psychological cushions for the person being accused.

That’s what Old Souls reminds me of. People zoom through the exciting moments of their reincarnations, dizzy from the possibilities, and they even embrace traumas. But the awful things they do become closed off behind a door that they make harder and harder to access as they continue to be reborn. They don’t want to know. And that’s pretty human. Few people ever want to know.

Old Souls

This dynamic is typical of how we approach cultural memory, which is very much what Old Souls is about. Chris’ past lives involve multiple points of dark moments in history — the Japanese occupation of China, the Viet Nam War, the Spanish Inquisition. The one that causes him extreme trauma places him as a slave owner in Virginia. But it’s only a personal loss that sends Chris careening into present trauma. He’s far more concerned about the personal toll he believes his role as a slave owner brought than the actual evil of owning human beings.

This makes Old Souls a much more difficult work than it originally appeared to be, because by the end of it, there is an aspect to Brian McDonald‘s story that implies that in Chris’ reaction to his past lives he still haven’t quite learned the wider lessons they teach, only the personal ones. It also implies that atrocities are cultural manifestations of human weaknesses and humans can during a lifetime find themselves on either side of the conflicts and still not learn the lesson that needs to be learned.

But Old Souls also suggests that the root to curing the larger ills might come from focusing on the smaller ones, and from having empathy. In its cosmology, we have been everyone, and the universal demand is that we use this experience for wider perspective. It is not that hard to recognize dehumanizing atrocities for what they are without a personal stake, and it is not all that demanding to stand against them, refuse to act them out. You may just be a white guy with a dumb job at the mall, struggling to build a life for your family, but that shouldn’t make it impossible for you to see the struggles of others or to sympathise with the traumas they cause.

Chris is a man with a loving wife and child and a steady job at a local mall. His life gets turned upside down when Jack, a homeless man he buys lunch for, tells him that he's Chris's grandmother from another life; Jack has never been able to get over being separated from Chris during the 1937 Raid of Nanking. At first, Chris thinks Jack is insane, but he gradually starts to believe and discover his own past lives. Jack introduces him to Del, who's able to help him delve into other previous lives, where Chris becomes obsessed with a life where he lost a young son to illness. As Chris spirals out of control, Jack tries to help him detach and focus on his present life.

Old Souls has a strong premise that falters a bit in the storytelling. At points, the narrative seems to be caught in a loop, going over the same moments again and again, and the book's momentum stalls. The black and white artwork provides for some stark, noir-like moments. The message is a popular one: embrace the present, don't dwell on the past.

An additional purchase for collections where you have dedicated adult graphic novel readers.

I actually feel bad for this author, because it isn't their fault that I can't give this a proper review. The eARC file for this book is literally impossible for me to read. The artwork is all in this weird red and blue contrast style that I am assuming was PROBABLY not at all intentional, or if it was, maybe it was to dissuade eARC recipients from uploading the ACSM file to pirate sites? If that was the case, I hope the publishers would try again next time with watermarks or something easier to read around, because just a few pages of this graphic novel has me sitting here with a literal headache forming.

I think the initial idea of <i> Old Souls</i> is interesting. The main character happens gets involved with a group of people who can show you all of your past lives and how those connections influence your present. Sounds interesting, right? Unfortunately, the execution is a bit of a mess. The main character is selfish and unlikable. I found his treatment of his wife to be gross and the ending made me roll my eyes a bit because it destroyed any character development his wife had. More important, however is the cringe-worthy/inappropriate dialect in one of the main character's past lives. Aren't we a bit past writing black characters to say things like, "Massa, sir?"

Since I received an ARC of this book I cannot really comment on the art. The e-copy I received didn't work well, so it was very hard to see the panels--everything was red and blue. Had I been able to see the art properly, I might adjust my rating a bit because from what I could see there were potentially beautiful panels.

Thank you NetGalley for the ARC of this book.

The story line is an interesting one. It is fresh and different than many graphic novels that I've read recently. Those are the pluses. The minuses have more to do with the reader than the content. I have no idea if the illustrations are well-done. I am extremely near-sighted and, as such, cannot see 3D renderings. It makes life difficult when confronted with things like the IMAX or this graphic novel. This also made the text difficult to decipher, but the story was well-crafted and it made it worth it. This skews older than my elementary library and I don't know if I have the readers at the public library, but it is a definite recommend for those that would like to expand their GN section to include something new, fresh, and cutting edge.

An interesting graphic novel. Cool artwork and a fun storyline. I'll definitely recommend this one to patrons and friends alike.