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LOUD

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The LOUD nightclub. A latecomer stripper, a pissed waitress, a hitmen couple, a suspension bondage performer, a pregnant teenager, a clan of vampires, a pedophile, a lesbian junkie, a divorcing middle-aged woman, a sadistic dominatrix, and many other souls in search of love, drugs, and blood converge at the hottest club in town on a night that none will ever forget. If they survive.

LOUD is like THE HUNGER if directed by Tarantino -- a stylish, tripped-out bloodbath of beautiful and vicious decadence.

You’ll feel the beat throbbing in your skull, smell the sweat, taste the blood, and lose yourself in the wicked underworld masterfully wrought by MARIA LLOVET.

Lovingly designed for release as a hardbound edition, LOUD is the kind of book that will get into your spine and give you flashbacks twenty years later, you’ll turn to your friend and say “remember when comics had guts and creators made books like LOUD?”

104 pages, Hardcover

Published February 25, 2020

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About the author

Maria Llovet

95 books94 followers
Maria Llovet is a comics author and Illustrator from Barcelona.
As a complete author, she has published numerous graphic novels in Europe and the US, such as Luna, Loud, Heartbeat, Eros/Psyche or Porcelain, among others.
As an artist, she has collaborated with Brian Azzarello in “Faithless” for Boom! Studios and with James Tynion IV in “Sandman Universe: Nightmare Country” and “Thessaly” for DC.

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5 stars
18 (12%)
4 stars
48 (34%)
3 stars
46 (32%)
2 stars
22 (15%)
1 star
7 (4%)
Displaying 1 - 22 of 22 reviews
Profile Image for Michael.
1,565 reviews187 followers
June 10, 2020
Eine denkwürdige Nacht im angesagten Club "Loud": Ein Pädophiler auf der Suche nach einem kleinen Mädchen, eine Stripperin, ein Killer-Pärchen, Drogendealer, ein schwangeres Mädchen, ein anderes mit einer Überdosis, alle Spielarten der Liebe, vor allem aber der wummernde Lärm der Musik, der nur nonverbale Kommunikation zulässt: Blicke, Gesten, Körpersprache.
LOUD zeigt, was graphisches Erzählen leisten kann. Llovet schickt den Leser durch eine Nacht voller Sex und Gewalt. Nach einiger Zeit kommen dem Leser schon einige der Nachtclubbesucher bekannt vor, sie sind Menschen mit Hoffnungen und Problemen. Viele von ihnen werden diese Nacht, die den wildesten Träumen Tarantinos entsprungen sein könnte, nicht überleben.
Llovets Zeichnungen sind genial, gerade in ihrer Reduktion. Auf den sauberen Strich, den sie beherrscht, hat sie hier verzichtet, so trifft die Stimmung im Club perfekt. Die Bilder sprechen für sich, es gibt in der gesamten GN nur ganz wenige Sprechblasen. Trotzdem ergibt sich eine zusammensetzbares Puzzle, eine menschliche Komödie der Lust, Hoffnungen und Enttäuschungen.

Graphisches Erzählen vom Feinsten.
Auf ihrer Website kann man sich reichlich Artwork von Maria Llovet anschauen:
http://www.mariallovet.com/

Profile Image for Dave Schaafsma.
Author 6 books31.9k followers
November 12, 2020
I happen to have read two graphic novels in a row that are both about music and are wordless. At a glance, they couldn’t seem more different; one is Bix, by Scott Chandler about a Davenport, Iowa pianist, cornetist and composer, one of the most influential musicians of the 1920’s. Bix didn’t talk much but communicated largely through his music. Loud, by Maria Llovet, takes place in a strip club with punk/rock music; it’s too loud to talk, one presumes; again, most of what you “hear” is music.

So both books are what I would call “art” comics (where formal, compositional elements seem to be foregrounded more than anything else), even “poetry” comics (where as with lyrical poetry, the comics foreground the juxtaposition of images as it is constructed--no, composed is the word at least as it pertains to these music books). Bix is a narrative, a biography of a quiet musician, but it proceeds as Loud does through images, the totality of which are. . . musical. But the effect is cool, dark, jazz, elegant. Impressive cartooning.

Loud has a narrative, and something dramatic at the end happens, but the narrative is not really the point, I think. The book is a series of images, that add up to. . .. music, but not jazz, but rather loud punk music roaring through the bar. In Loud we meet strippers, a pedophile looking for a young girl, a sadistic dominatrix, a divorcing middle-aged woman, two hitmen, but they swirl around in the drug and alcohol and music and nude dancing. “What’s going on” is more a sum of images than a story, though all the drama does lead to a conclusion, one that maybe fits the Tarantino-esque violence of punk more than jazz, but both feature deaths.

Llovet’s artwork is formally impressive; look closely at the formal progression of panel to panel, which is how comics speak, and you can see that it teaches a lot about how comics work to create a vision. Comics usually wed words and images. Both use words sparingly--Bix through one scene where his wife tries to get him to talk about his family; in Loud Llovet uses words for sounds, like bow, bum--those drums and bass throbbing-wob, crash, and a couple word bubbles throughout, but neither need words to help us understand what is going on. Impressive cartooning.
Profile Image for Laura Noizez_Reads.
164 reviews86 followers
May 15, 2020
3,5 stelle e mezzo, ma anche qualcosa di più.
Originale, punk e violento.
Una nottata al nightclub Loud e succede di tutto.
Molto Tarantiniano, mi ha ricordato "Dal Tramonto all'Alba".
Autrice da tenere d'occhio, consigliato!
Profile Image for Daniel Vlasaty.
Author 16 books44 followers
December 20, 2022
Not really a fan of “silent” comics but Maria Llovet’s art is always great.
Profile Image for Alex Sarll.
6,497 reviews326 followers
Read
May 3, 2023
The blurb says this "is like The Hunger if directed by Tarantino", which isn't quite right, though I do appreciate that the cover design has left a female foot pointing right at 'Tarantino'. For myself, I'd say a more fevered, less comedic Forgetless - that same sense of the lives that collide in a nightclub*, one couple passionately getting it on in the loos while in the next cubicle a lone woman weeps over a pregnancy test. Also a less wordy Forgetless, because as the title suggests, this club is too loud for much chat - and the volume is nicely conveyed with single thumping syllables that almost become part of the background, though for the British reader it is slightly unfortunate that the most prevalent one is BUM. Still, giggles at that aside, Llovet's art displays her usual gift for capturing glances ripe with possibility, the passionate kisses that follow, and the betrayal and blood after those.

*Obviously this microgenre should also include The Singles Club, but I've been to too many provincial British indie nights to be able to ascribe the same chaotic glamour to provincial British indie nights, magic or no.
Profile Image for Francesca Giardiello.
793 reviews13 followers
June 3, 2020
Un piccolo fiasco purtroppo. Tanta carne al fuoco: una discoteca, dei vampiri, il casino, il sadismo, il sesso.. ma zero conclusioni. Il sesso come i corpi nudi non fanno più scalpore così come il porco di turno. Apprezzo molto l'idea di usare il caos della discoteca per dare un'impronta senza parlato, ma avrei preferito che questa idea venisse portata fino alla fine. Loud ha il sapore amaro di un esperimento in cui non si è creduto abbastanza, una storia nata con il botto ma finita immediatamente nel dimenticatoio al termine della lettura.
Profile Image for Chris.
50 reviews
February 15, 2021
"LOUD is like THE HUNGER if directed by Tarantino -- a stylish, tripped-out bloodbath of beautiful and vicious decadence"

Tarantino this is not. It is stylish, it's trippy bloody beautiful viscous and decadent... but that's all it is. Loud! utterly lacks substance. It's kind of fun to sink into it's rich colors (the art really is fantastic) and the booming music of the titular nightclub, but once anything starts to *happen* and the book attempts to tie it's various vignettes together, it instead all comes loose.
Profile Image for StrictlySequential.
3,443 reviews15 followers
September 23, 2022
Dumb and Tarantinoesque in the absurdity of the shootout and who catches the bullets and who somehow don't despite them all being aimed at those two who even make-out as they are being shot at. The last page is the stupidest part of the whole absurdity. And vampires? Come onnnnn....

Very confusing unless you keep going back over it to try to figure out who is who and why things are happening. It's still an incredibly fast read so everything about it is unsatisfying.

The art is decent yet too chaotic and imprecise where it matters and too many characters look too similar.
Profile Image for Jessi Joan.
Author 11 books9 followers
February 12, 2021
Super cool comic. I would read it several times as I’m sure every time I would notice something new. Very little dialogue - it’s a visual comic that almost reads like a movie. Cool character development.
Profile Image for mars.
251 reviews40 followers
May 27, 2022
i love maria llovet's psychosexual subjects but my god can they be hard to follow. i get that was kinda the point, but i needed a little bit more something to ground me instead of not knowing what was happening the entire time
Profile Image for Aries Aster.
150 reviews
June 6, 2022
It's edgy just for the point and has no plot with senseless violence, but the art is phenomenal and it was enjoyable. Three stars, but not something I would recommend, unless you want to look at pretty pictures.
Profile Image for Jenny Butor.
27 reviews1 follower
July 31, 2022
CW/TW : Sexual abuse, child abuse, substance use, violence. This was hard to read. The art is the real star. The plot's convoluted, and with little to no dialogue, there is no hope for clarification.
Profile Image for Moni.
85 reviews
June 28, 2022
La narrativa de esta historia sin apenas diálogo es de lo mejor que he visto! Brutal, me ha encantado.
383 reviews
July 30, 2023
Sin muchas palabras y buenos gráficos sorprende esta mininovela de historias entrecortadas en un solo lugar muy bueno. Lo malo el final abrupto aunque irónico
Profile Image for Ilia.
270 reviews2 followers
December 26, 2023
Love it (sorry). An exercise in comics storytelling with almost no dialogue (I also can barely hear anyone talking in a nightclub). This does so much with character design and costume, and deploys a neat trick where background characters move into the foreground and back. Very sleazy, with an excellent blood-drenched climax.
Profile Image for DB JETT.
19 reviews
July 21, 2020
I might have rated this 4 stars, but I gave it an extra one for being so different. There us almost no dialog/narration. The story is told about 97% through the art. I fell in love with Maria's work on Faithless and really enjoyed her Heartbeat series. This book is a wonderful collection to her catalog, as well as your own collection.
Displaying 1 - 22 of 22 reviews

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