Love: The Mastiff

KIRKUS -- A hunter's dog undertakes a solitary journey through lavishly detailed Australian landscapes. Like its four stand-alone predecessors in the wordless Love series, the art-gathered in neat arrays of midsized panels, often superimposed onto broader views of rocky vistas-teems with naturalistically painted wildlife. Here it's all distinctively Australian and so often going about the business of living, dying, hunting, and raising young that the storyline plays out in the background. In that story a burly dog sees his master killed by a snake. After unsuccessfully trying to defend the corpse from a pack of wild dogs, he makes his way, exhausted and battered after further battles with, first, the alpha dog and then later with another venomous snake, overland to a farmhouse. There, in a poignant final sequence, the hunter's family rushes out in the dark to welcome him back. “Love” doesn't seem to be a major theme here, but while going light on gore (the hunter's eaten body is never seen-just the slavering dogs around it) and scenes of explicit predation, Bertolucci gives animal lovers plenty to pore over on nearly every page. Comments about the dangers of climate change in Australia make a worthy if tacked-on close. Immersive art gives this canine odyssey a vivid setting. (Graphic fiction. 7-11)