Comic Review: The Shadow Hero

I heard Gene Luen Yang talk about this book at Small Press Expo 2013 and it sounded like a pretty cool idea, take an older comic which had never gotten off the ground and indulge in some fan theories by redoing it as a Chinese-American superhero for sure and just making a good story out of it. I didn't expect my library to get it but over the past few months I've started seeing more newer manga titles out there and my theory that my branch suddenly has a very savvy librarian was confirmed when I saw a "Sad that Naruto is over? Try these!" display in the window. I was walking out and glanced back over only to see this book there, doubled back, checked that these books were actually available to check out, and then headed home with one more book in an already too-full book bag, hope some other people got something good out of that display as well!

The Shadow Hero written by Gene Luen Yang and illustrated by Sonny Liew

Comic Review: Boxers and Saints

I have mixed feelings on Gene Luen Yang's other works, I've liked some like American Born Chinese and questioned the writing in others (like the Avatar spin-off comics) but the dual nature of this story caught my eye from the beginning and the seemingly universal positive reviews of the story further intrigued me. Plus, after hearing Yang talk about this work and his upcoming comic at Small Press Expo I was garunteed to check it out, hearing people eloquently talk about themes important to them in their writings gets me every time!

Boxers and Saints by Gene Luen Yang

Comic Review: Avatar: The Last Airbender: The Search Part One

Hmm, so it appears that my library does not yet have Wandering Son Volume 4 and that it is in fact still in the process of ordering, guess that review won't be up for a while. I had originally hoped to push this review back a little bit in the hopes that my library might get the second volume soon so there wouldn't be a large gap in reviews but, since I recently found out that there was also a third volume in this series and my library just got this volume, it looks like that plan of mine is also a bust. Drat, well, time to talk about Avatar (and it appears that I somehow forgot to review The Promise when I finished it sorry about that folks, might get to that in the future might not!). In case people are confused, yes this is a direct sequel to The Promise which is a direct sequel to Avatar: The Last Airbender and I do recommend reading The Promise before The Search, although you could probably follow the story relatively easily if you haven't.


Avatar: The Last Airbender, The Search (part one) written by Gene Luen Yang, illustrated by Gurihiru

Comic Review: The Promise part one

As promised, more Avatar: the last airbender stuff! The Legend of Korra takes place 70 years after the original series and in a completely different setting so the creators (Bryan Konietzko and Michael Dante DiMartino) decided to create a short, three volume comic to show how the new setting was established and hopefully wrap up a few plot threads from the original series that were never resolved but that's for another review. Sadly not all of the books came out before the series premiered, the second volume came out just a few days ago, and it's going to be a while before I get to the second book but for the moment, here's how the first volume shapes up. As a note, this review is a bit more spoilery than normal but, considering how a lot of stuff in here can already be inferred from Korra/the Republic City game on the Nick site there's not much I can do about that.

Avatar: The Last Airbender The Promise Part One written by Gene Luen Yang and illustrated by Gurihiru (lettered by Michael Heisler)

Summary: It's been a year since Aang defeated Firelord Ozai and agreement has been reached between the Fire Nation and the Earth Kingdom for all fire nation colonists to return to their ancestral homes to help change the world back to what it was 100 years ago. But the world has permanently changed in those 100 years and the new conflicts have arisen, ones that don't have any easy solutions to them. 

The Good: Much like the anime Last Exile: Fam of the Silver Wing from earlier in the year, The Promise tackles a question that doesn't appear as much in non-historical/realistic fiction, at what point do "immigrants" become "natives", much like one of the problems that plagues modern day Israel. Korra watchers know what the solution here is but it'll be interesting to see how the characters manage to come to it. The comics also incorperate a number of plotlines that were left hanging at the end of the tv series (such as whatever happened to the Earth King after his last appearance in the comics and perhaps, finally! closure about Zuko's mother) and starts bringing in plots that will connect to Korra (such as Toph's earthbending school which would later become where she trains the first metal bending cops). This mini-series has a lot of ground to cover but it making good progress in dealing with everything.

The Bad: It may be dealing with everything but goodness is it short and fast paced. It's only about 70 pages long, it took me under 20 minutes to read the whole thing, and much like Korra is means the characterization feels a bit rushed. I felt like some parts (such as Aang's decision that he must kill Zuko after all) felt almost random they were so rushed and, even though I have always been an ardant Kataang shipper, I'll admit that Katara and Aang calling each other "sweetie" and such did seem incredibly out of place with the language previously used in the series*. I was a bit underwhelmed overall by the volume but hopefully the next two will make up for that.

The Art: The book was drawn by a team of Japanese artists called Gurihiru (which as some people have pointed out could technically make this manga, I think of it as a comic since the original creators are American as I believe Gene Luen Yang is as well) and they do a pretty good idea sticking to the original art style of the series. It helps that over the years I've seen a number of other ATLA comics (all of which I believe have been collected in The Lost Adventures) so I don't mind that the style was slightly different from the tv show. I'm a bit surprised how well the pages flowed together, sure the comic didn't use a lot of elaborate panel layouts but the artists were still working left to right instead of right to left and having that kind of flexibility is rather impressive.


Again like LE:Fam, I really wish this in-between comic had been fully released before the start of Korra since so far nothing in here has spoiled Korra (indeed it's been the other way around) but it is doing a fairly good job filling in the gaps and I hope it does improve from here. It'll be a while I suspect before I get the second volume (just due to me needing to budget even more carefully than usual) but I do plan on buying the second and third volumes as well (and the third won't be out until September I believe).


*it also kept reminding me of River Song from Doctor Who but that one is my own fault.