Comic Review: The Nameless City (book one)

So I've already talked about seeing Faith Erin Hicks talk at the book launch so let's not rehash that and just dive straight into a pretty anticipated work.

The Nameless City by Faith Erin Hicks, colors by Jordie Bellaire

Comic Review: Nothing Can Possibly Go Wrong

Phew, I actually did not know if I was going to be able to review this title until last night when the last page was posted, talk about down to the wire! Especially since, like last year's Friends With Boys the full version of this comic is only going to be online for a short while longer (until the 7th, I suspect a part of it will remain up as a preview) so I really wanted to tell people about this as soon as I could. I mentioned Friends With Boys for a reason there, this is Faith Erin Hick's newest (I think?) work, although this time it's a sorta-kinda collaboration with the author Prudence Shen. What happened was that several years back Prudence Shen wrote a book, shopped it around, and an agent who had worked with Faith before read it and then bought the rights with the intent to develop it into a graphic novel instead which is something I'm sure must have happened before but I can't actually recall hearing another case like it. This did make me a little hesitant going in, since I seem to like Faith's work when she's writing and drawing it but not just drawing it, but it seems like a combination of Shen's writing and how Faith adapted it just worked for me.


Nothing Could Possibly Go Wrong by Prudence Shen and Faith Erin Hicks

Summary: Charlie was having a fairly good start to the school year, even if his girlfriend (Holly, the head cheerleader) suddenly broke up with him, and things go downhill quickly when his friend Nate starts a fight with the cheerleaders over misplaced school funding that both groups want and Charlie finds himself in the middle of a bizarre scuffle that involves student body elections, family drama, and a robot rumble. 

The Good: As noted earlier, Shen wrote the original novel but Faith adapted it to work as a graphic novel style (and sized) story and I would have never guessed that since it's such a good fit. The author notes on various pages note that there was only one major change to the story (a scene near the end and I completely agree with the change) so I guess this means I should keep an eye out for Shen's other works as well. As for the actual story, much like Friends I was pleasantly surprised to see that Charlie is dealing with divorced parents because, well, I've been there and once I started looking I noticed that most YA books that had a protagonist with divorced parents either glossed over it or it happened so many years ago that the protagonist was okay with it. Here it's still a very raw part of Charlie's life and I really wish I had had this story a few years earlier. Other than that, the character felt fleshed out, I really like the choice to portray Holly the cheerleader as cool and distant instead of bitchy and all the major players get enough fleshing out to feel like real characters by the end. 

The Bad: The ending felt a little rocky to me but that could be because again I wasn't sure when it was going to finish and really wanted it to be soon so I could actually review it, I'm sure it reads much better when all read at once. Likewise, while the pacing felt fine more or less I'm sure the robot fight scenes will flow much better when people aren't reading them page by page and that's a really tricky kind of pacing for people to master and considering that this was created to be a print book I would have been incredibly impressed if the book's pacing flowed well both ways. 

The Art: The art is rather nice, the characters look distinct from each other with a variety of body shapes, faces, noses, and no two hair styles look alike, and all of the many action scenes look fine. There are a few pages where it's a bit hard to follow what the robots are doing but I think that's because I'm less experienced with robot fights so in a way I don't know what to expect and that makes it harder to figure out what happened (versus say a fistfight which I've seen plenty of in movies over the years and that gives me the context to figure out what's going on in a comic book fistfight*). So anyway, by and large the art is rather nice and very solid with just one or two rough patches, the paneling is pretty nice as well.


A fun read and while I haven't ordered a copy yet (because finances, guys moving out on your own is TERRIFYING) but I highly recommend people who enjoyed it to do so and then to post in the preorder campaign page so that they can unlock even more tiers/prizes in their special campaign. More about everything, and the comic itself, can be found over here and remember that the whole thing will be online only until the 7th so if you want to try it now is the time!




*unless you're Sailor Moon but that was two weeks ago)

Webcomic Review Month 2012: The Adventures of Superhero Girl

Yesterday's entry was a long one, sorry about that folks, but don't worry since it looks like only one other entry will be as long (I do get worried that with long entries like that that people tend to skim more and don't pay as much attention to all the webcomics). Today's comic is done by the same awesome lady who did Friends with Boys but with totally different subject matter.

The Adventures of Superhero Girl by Faith Erin Hicks
Superhero Girl lives in a world of magical realism where she spends her days foiling evil plots, fighting ninjas, and being told that she should really be more like her super-popular older, also a superhero, brother Kevin. 

ASG is more of a slice-of-life, gag a day comic rather than plot oriented like most superhero comics are and that gives it a certain charm. It's much more likely to poke fun at random, normal things in Superhero Girl's life than try and be a deconstruction about superheros in general, not that it plays all the superhero tropes straight either, and the way it approaches all of this is simply fun. It's paced well, the art is nice (even if it's not as detailed as some of Hick's other works but that makes sense, this is something she's doing for fun after doing all that detailed work for pay) and I hope she does collect the strips into a book someday.

 

Comic Review: Friends with Boys

No I didn't run out of movies/tv shows to review again, I decided the circumstances were right to break with my normal schedule for today. Starting Thursday the 1st I'm going to keep my normal Sunday, Monday, Friday, Saturday update schedule but, like last March, I'm going to spend the entire month reviewing webcomics instead and initially this comic was going to be talked about then. Then I found out this was less of a webcomic and more of a graphic novel that was being put online in it's entirety as a preview and that all but the first 16 pages were going to be taken down in a week and a half so I really couldn't wait until April to actually review this. So in light of all of that, plus my next tv review was going to be the first season of Life on Mars and really didn't want a month plus gap in the reviews between seasons, I'm just going to be different today and talk about Friends with Boys.

As mentioned above, the comic is actually a graphic novel that has just been put up online as a preview of sorts for the physical copy (which comes out any day now) and was done by Faith Erin Hicks whose works I've reviewed a few times before here. Unlike the last one I talked about, Brain Camp, she not only did all the artwork but also came up with the story much like her other work I've seen, The War at Ellsmere, and I was curious how that would work. I was a bit cautious about trying this one out because of the hype surrounding it (sadly I just don't seem to like a lot of webcomics that have a lot of hype surrounding them, not sure why but it just seems to be the case) but now I would like to add to the hype and say yes, this was really pretty good.

Friends With Boys by Faith Erin Hicks

    
Summary: Maggie, like her three older brothers, has been home-schooled all her life and is now starting her freshman year in high school in the local public school system which makes it even more terrifying than high school normally is. But while it was her parent's and her brothers' decision to go to a public high school instead of continuing with home-schooling Maggie doesn't have that choice, her mother has recently left (it's implied that it's partially the stress of having to home-school four kids) which has left an understandably big gap in her life. So Maggie must deal with all of this, make friends with the people whom her family doesn't like and figure out what the deal is with a local ghost that likes to haunt her. 

The Good: Ever since my parents separated when I was 16 I've been keeping a close eye out for books that deal well with that wonderful situation and Friends with Boys does a better job than most stories I've seen. My situation and Maggie's are really different but that raw feeling of unhappiness that sometimes seems like it's consuming your entire life is pretty accurate and I wasn't surprised to see that Hicks based quite a few things in the story off of her own life. Some of the high school bits seemed a bit off to me but since I went to a small, private high school and I didn't see anyone else complaining about that I think that's just me and that the setting also holds up well. Maggie was a fun main character, her brothers felt like brothers, and the story also felt like it was paced just right.  

The Bad: I was hoping for a slightly more substantial ending but, since life sometimes doesn't exactly resolve itself but rather simply continues, it works (and it helps that Hicks herself said she was expecting a different resolution as well and was surprised that this was what fit the best). It was rather frustrating that Maggie's father, who seemed like a sane, reasonable parent in his initial appearances, seems to be suddenly grasping the idiot ball at the climax where he refuses to listen her and judges others on their looks, especially since in his initial scene he was having to change his appearance because of how other would judge the new sheriff if he had long hair. That little bit ended up bothering me a lot more than the entire climax (since I can at least sympathize that when your world is that that confusing that you are going to do stupid stuff, although Maggie's actions were pushing that a bit). 

The Art: It's interesting to compare the art here to the art in her currently on-going webcomic, The Adventures of Superhero Girl, since it's clear from the character designs that this is the same artist but there's a lot more detail work, the backgrounds are more complex and there's a lot more shading. I like how her style looks here*, the character designs are distinctive and a little quirky looking, as I said there's a lot of nice details everywhere you look, and in general I prefer pen and ink shading to using a lot of screen tones**. It looks cartoony but in a very natural-ish way, not as if Hicks set out to draw things in a "cartoon style" but that this is her normal style which is simply cartoon influenced. I do think the drawing of Maggie on the cover looks a bit odd, probably because an upward looking angle on most people simply isn't flattering, but other than that I didn't have any problems with the art at all.

So, my favorite work by Faith Erin Hicks and I'll be sure to grab a physical copy sometime. Like I said, for the next week and a half it's still up online and I would really encourage everyone to check it out and see how you like it. Oh and if you do check it out make sure to look at the author's comments under the pages, Hicks has a lot of great blog posts about working in comics, why Fullmetal Alchemist is an awesome manga, and on homeschooling. I believe those blog posts will stay up after the rest of the comic goes down and I really encourage people to look at those as well. 




*and in ASG but that's for later in the week
** I blame reading too much shojo for that one, I've just seen so many series that abuse the screentones that it often comes out looking cheap to me.  

Comic Review: Brain Camp

Sorry that this one is going up so late and that it's a bit short, no excuse for the former but I've just burned part of my hands for the second time in the week so I really don't want to do tons and tons of typing. This is a pretty quick book anyway so there isn't tons and tons for me to type, found it at the local library and recognized the title since I had seen Faith Erin Hicks, who did the art, talk about it (currently reading her Friends with Boys and Adventures of Superhero Girl comics) and I read The War at Ellsmere sometime last year (I believe I have an unflattering review of that lying around here somewhere but would rather not dig it up) so I decided that I should give this book a whirl as well.

Brain camp by Susan Kim, Laurence Klavan, and Faith Erin Hicks

Summary: Neither Jenna nor Lucas are the apple of their parents' eyes and so when their parents get the chances to send their kids to Camp Fielding, an exclusive summer camp which seems to turn average kids into geniuses, they leap at the chance and deposit the protesting teens there. Neither of them can stand the camp, or each other, but quickly realize that the camp is more shady than it already seems and that some truly horrific events are going on behind the scenes.

The Good: I'm always amused at what settings horror writers will use next and I can see the logic in using a summer camp, some of them are pretty horrific on their own. The horror bits were well done, they came across as strange and scary and the strangeness made it even creepier without coming off as, pardon the pun, camp.

The Bad: The pacing seemed just a bit off here, everything flowed much too quickly, I ended up reading the whole book in just about half and hour because of it’s fast pace, so the story never had anytime to really sink in. Of course that might have been for the best, all of the adults are flat, one-dimensional characters (a common problem with children’s stories, you have to keep the adults from getting in the way of the plot so why not make them idiots?) and the romance that sprung up really felt unexpected to me. I should’ve expected romance given the kinds of characters and age group the story was aimed at but when categories, not the plot itself, explain the story better then you have a problem.

The Art: As I said earlier, I picked up this book because of Faith Erin Hick’s name on it so the art was as I expected. It was solid and worked well, the characters looked different, emoted, and the backgrounds were well drawn, the art was a good fit for the book.

I was a bit disappointed with this book overall, I was just expecting a bit more out of it overall. Oh well, it is a short book and it's much harder to great something really great and grand in a shorter space .