Aang and gang are back in the next installment of “Avatar: The Last Airbender” from Faith Erin Hicks and Peter Wartman, picking up threads from ‘The Rift’ arc and exploring the foundations of Cranefish Town, the proto–Republic City. But is ‘Imbalance, Part 2’ hampered by its politics?
Created by Bryan Konietzko and Michael Dante DiMartinoCover by Peter Wartman
with Ryan Hill
Written by Faith Erin Hicks
Illustrated by Peter Wartman
Colored by Adele Matera
Lettered by Richard Starkings and Jimmy BetancourtAang and Team Avatar race to resolve rising tensions between benders and non-benders before a town is torn apart!
Written by Faith Erin Hicks (The Nameless City) and drawn by Peter Wartman (Stonebreaker), in collaboration with Avatar: The Last Airbender creators Michael Dante DiMartino and Bryan Konietzko, this is the ultimate continuation of Avatar!
Paul Lai: Back in December 2018, we reviewed ‘Imbalance, Part 1’. We were both really high on the first part of the story, both excited for the creative team and how seamlessly they took on the reigns of storytelling for these distinctive and highly regarded characters. The old pals, Aang, Toph, Katara, Sokka, and crew, arrive in a newish place, Cranefish Town in Toph’s old earthbender haunts, which has been subjected to an industrial boom and now experiences open conflict on the streets between benders and non-benders.
Before launching into Part 2, I re-read Part 1, but this time I started to get Star Wars prequel vibes a bit: I wondered if we were getting more council negotiations and character tropes than Avataresque intrigue and fun. Now that’s a pretty harsh characterization, and I don’t actually hold that opinion, but I did momentarily second guess whether I had overhyped Part 1 in my mind.
Now we have Part 2 to add to the mix. Do Faith Erin Hicks and Peter Wartman still pull off the finely balanced chemistry that made the show and the subsequent comics adaptations successful? What do you think, Mark?
Mark Tweedale: Like you, I also reread ‘Imbalance, Part 1’ before diving into Part 2. As well as that, I reread ‘The Rift’ arc, which first introduced Cranefish Town and the Beifong’s Earthen Fire Industries. I wanted to see how Hicks and Wartman picked up on elements specifically created for the comics by their predecessors, Gene Luen Yang and Gurihiru,. But we’ll get to that later.
The Star Wars prequel statement makes sense though. The engine behind the Avatar television series was “How do we defeat the Fire Lord?” In the comics, the engine has become “How do we live together?” It’s been a core question in each arc since the comics began, and it’s a question that by its very nature is political, so naturally the series becomes more political. But Yang and Gurihiru, and now Hicks and Wartman, have used politics to explore the philosophies of the characters, and to bring about change. (In fact, accepting change was the central theme of ‘The Rift’ arc.)
As for Avatarverse intrigue and fun, for me, that’s still there, but I can’t speak for everyone on that—it’s such a nebulous thing, and all Avatar fans have our own sense of what that is. When we get to the spoiler-filled section of the review, I’ll talk about a scene that very much captured the feeling I think of as Avatar-esque. For now I’ll just say I thoroughly enjoyed it.
On the topic of Star Wars–iness, one thing that came close to crossing a line was all the callback elements. Very early on in Part 2 Sokka steps into detective mode and puts on his infamous hat from the season two episode “Avatar Day.” Then later there’s a fake beard from season three. This walked right up to the line of being gratuitous for me, but didn’t quite cross it. What saved it was how these elements express Sokka’s nostalgia for the good ol’ days, rather than simply preying on the audience’s nostalgia. Still, it’s a fine line.
Paul: Yes! The show has always had profound real world parallels, and you could build an interesting college course on the political theory of the Avatarverse. But just as our characters seem to be maturing, so does the conversation about those parallels and metaphors, I think.
Continued belowThis story is about conflicts and tensions between benders and non-benders in the Cranefish Town community, which our heroes unearth (pun intended) more and more as the story deepens. Many times throughout this volume, there were conversations where, if this were the TV show, they would start the discussion with just enough lines to show the tension, and then cut away… but here, they played the conversation out with more extended dialogue. To me, there’s a narrative maturation there.
I welcome that maturation, but it definitely gives me the feeling that this is less “entry point storytelling,” more “deep cuts for the fans.” I’ve mentioned in the past, I read these with my daughter, who is now eight years old, and who never actually finished watching the shows but has loved the Dark Horse comics. She’s less of a fan of action heroics, more of appealing character development.
Reading these with a kid, I definitely feel like ‘Imbalance’ services less of the younger audience demands. But actually, I didn’t mind that at all, because my kid isn’t as young as she was when we started these, and she was certainly aboard for a little fun chat with dad about environmental ruin and white supremacy metaphors. (That sounds tongue-in-cheek, but I’m being sincere.)
Mark: I think with the best long-form children’s storytelling, each new tale matures with its readers. That’s part of the joy of it.
Paul: To pivot away from my non-criticism criticism, did you find yourself entertained by ‘Imbalance, Part 2?’ Surprised? Satisfied?
Mark: I don’t think I was every really surprised, but I was entertained, and definitely satisfied. I mean, Toph is my favorite character, and this is definitely a Toph-focused arc, and I think Faith Erin Hicks really knows how to write her. We’re going to have to go into spoiler territory to dig into this properly though.
Paul: Toph is delightful. The creators really seized on that aspect of her character that really doesn’t care what others think of her because she’s so assured of what a world-beater she is. They really captured her wavelength and let it blast in this story.
Toph’s bluntness is a really useful driver for this particular story too, which is about the under-the-surface enmities brewing underneath the polite veneers and public social graces that are characteristic of cities. Cities are these places teeming with new and mobile populations, as we see in Cranefish Town. Covering over these simmering bender/non-bender tensions are these layers of silent looks and quiet mistrust, which Wartman renders so well among the townspeople’s faces and postures. Toph just jump-kicks through all that subtlety, and it’s a cool way to bring to life this character who has always worked on different frequencies from the rest of the cast.
Mark: I loved seeing more range from Toph this time around. You spoke earlier of Avataresque fun, and for me the scene in the book that captures my definition of that was Toph “teaching” Yaling metal bending on the beach. It’s just pure character interaction, showing the side of Toph I most like to see. Toph literally reads people with her earth bending, and so when she’s manipulative like this, it feels like a character extension of her bending abilities.
And earlier there was another fantastic scene when the Aang gang goes to talk to Liling at her home. This is a scene that does a lot of things at once. It’s giving us lots of exposition and mixing it with some fantastic character building. It even uses a little bit with Momo and a cat to steer the conversation into setting up specific bending mechanics. I love how much is going on here. Especially when we have Liling saying something and Aang is understanding one thing from what she’s said while Toph is understanding something else entirely. The shifting power dynamics in the scene are fantastic, but made even more compelling because most of the characters aren’t even aware of the shifts. Every line of dialogue is working on at least two levels of meaning. There’s even a great scene where Toph, who has been manipulating the conversation subtly the whole time, shows off her metal bending in front of everyone and the background color in the scene completely changes to green (Toph’s color). That’s how in control of the scene she is—it is putty in her hands.
Continued below
I think this element, that every character understands something different about what’s going on, is what ended up being my favorite element in this book. I love that Sokka’s instinct is kicking in with Liling, but he can’t quite put his finger on it, so he just focuses on the way she uses the word “humble.”
And this is great for tension too. We can see the problem between Ru and Yaling far more clearly than Yaling or Liling. And yet it’s precisely because Ru understands the non-bender experience that she’s able to read the power dynamics of the conversation far better than either her mother or her sister.
Paul: Yes! I love your reading of those scenes. Reminds me of all those tweets where people disenchanted with Game of Thrones asked what television series has accomplished scope and depth like GoT promised to, and all these people were like, “Um, have you seen Avatar?!?” It’s that subtlety that Hicks and Wartman have continued.
I’m really interested in talking about those tensions and how they’re portrayed. As I mentioned, there’s some pretty straightforward analogies to social group hierarchies and modern resentments embedded in the conflicts that Team Avatar encounters here. I’ve mentioned the allusion to “bender supremacy” that points clearly to white supremacy.
But I was really struck by the shouted “We will not be replaced!” from a bender in the rally Liling has organized, which echoed the “You will not replace us!” chants from the Unite the Right rallies a few years ago in Charlottesville. The entire premise of a privileged class being economically displaced by new industrial technologies and harboring entitled resentment that leads to violence… it all hits very close to home in the context of resurgent white nationalism in the West. It doesn’t seem like a particularly profound statement at this point, but I do think it’s pretty bold to tackle. And of course, the parallels can extend beyond categories of race… and in some ways, benders/non-benders is almost certainly a really faulty analogue for racial and cultural divides.
Mark: I find the topic of privileged bending a useful way to talk about all kinds of privilege, especially white privilege. The power inequality between benders and non-benders is something that I feel can handle these sorts of discussions far better than say X-Men, where the powers of the oppressed mutant class can create some uneven allegories. In a confrontation, especially one that escalates to a physical confrontation, the benders’ power over non-benders often shows how privilege insulates benders from consequences. Their bending grants them all kinds of societal advantages they’re barely even aware of.
Of course, analogies are always imperfect by definition, and the degree of fault is worth discussing too. You specifically mentioned racial and cultural divides, so I’m curious what jumped out to you about those two here.
Paul: Not to get too wonky here, but a lot of times the way we talk about racial and cultural tensions presumes those tensions always arose because of bad actors, your Hitlers and Klansmen… and clearly they do! But what I like about these creators’ story is that this bender/non-bender conflict is instigated, heightened, and exacerbated by how quickly Cranefish Town expands, how industrial machinery comes to displace human labor, and how ideas about “other” groups turn into ideologies about fitness and entitlement. Just as with racism and white supremacy historically, these tensions are not in isolation from the way this fictional world shifts and changes in this late-Aang, ante-Korra era.
For people who skipped that whole paragraph (I sympathize), my point is, Team Avatar’s got their work cut out for them, trying to bring peace.
Mark: Yeah, it’s not about just beating a bad guy. There needs to be structural change in their society too.
Changing gears for a bit, I wanted to talk about the art. I’m curious, did you notice the shift in the colors? Ryan Hill did the colors for Part 1, but Adele Matera took over for Part 2. The first thing I noticed was how much warmer this book felt—Hill’s shadows were colder in a majority of his scenes, and when they were warmer they were less saturated that Matera’s are. The first sequence in this book is set at dawn, with the coolness of night changing to the warmness of day, and Matera uses this to bridge Hill’s style to her own. By the time we get to page four, the transition’s complete.
Continued belowThe changes become even more noticeable when Part 2 returns to locations from Part 1, like Cranefish’s beach. I especially love the way Matera’s used colored linework to guide the reader’s eye, keeping the focal area in black, with the framing linework softened by color.
She also uses colored linework on the characters’ eyes for the iris, but not always. When a character’s eyes are very tiny in a panel she’ll use it to make eyelines read more clearly or reduce image detail. She often uses it soften characters’ expressions or to ramp up intensity. Occasionally she’ll revert to black, giving the character’s eyes a harsher look, to punctuate a moment of anger or frustration.
Middle: Hyper detailing for intensity.
Right: Unaltered iris line to show frustration.
Paul: Love that breakdown, Mark! I’ll resist the temptation to chime in with some additional examples of Matera’s many subtle contributions that add up to a really ideal fit for Wartman’s art. I’ll just say that the artists on this installment thread that needle of establishing their own distinct visual language while feeling so true to the personalities and world of the show. And in ways that are a little different from Gene Yang and Gurihiru’s. These creators keep living up to the high bar of custodianship of this beloved property.
Another way these stories seem to have matured, that I want to ask you about: both parts of this story have ended with a moment that’s meant to be dramatic and portentous, but not really spelled out for us. The first part of “Imbalance” ended with the revelation that Liling was behind the divisive conflicts. But there’s a definite punch to the ending of this installment that I might need a little refresher from Master Tweedale, my Avatarverse historian, about the dark significance of chi blocking and taking away bending powers. What am I missing?
Mark: For me, this reminded me of “The Avatar State” episode of the series. Aang had just saved the Northern Water Tribe by going into the Avatar state and forcing the Fire Nation forces out. Afterward, Earth Nation soldiers try to force the Avatar state as a way to win the war, which ultimately ends in disaster for them.
Chi blocking is much the same—it’s an extreme measure, one that shouldn’t be used without restraint. The one time Aang used it was against the Phoenix King, and he used it to spare his life. But we’ve seen what happens when this power is used to suppress others in The Legend of Korra: Book One—Air; this will ultimately heighten the animosity between benders and non-benders.
The difference is, Aang doesn’t have knowledge of these future events, so I’m very curious to see how he’ll navigate this situation. At this point in history, the escalation his chi blocking Liling will trigger is practically invisible. There’s a whole ethical discussion to be had here about what separates Aang from Amon, which I guess we’ll be delving into for Part 3.
Paul: Indeed, we will be delving…. But meanwhile, I love the methodological way these balances of power—and powers—are stacked one way and then another in this ethical chess match. What’s our final assessment?
Mark: I’m giving this a 8.5 again. Overall, this book maintains the quality from the previous installment—a wishy-washy comment, I know, but Hicks and Wartman clicked with this material straight away. The bar here was already so high.
Paul: Agreed. The consistency of these adaptations shouldn’t obscure the very smart ways it ratchets up tension while keeping true to its characters and their development. I do hope we see lots of payoffs in the third chapter, though.
Final verdict: 8.5 – Keeping true to the sophistication of Avatarverse stories, this installment of ‘Imbalance’ ups the ante.
