“Avatar: The Last Airbender—Suki, Alone”

“Avatar: The Last Airbender—Suki, Alone” is the third of a series of one-shots focused on single characters, forming a sort of trilogy showcasing strong women. And yet it is a marked departure from the other two in terms of tone. The others were primarily comedic, whereas ‘Suki, Alone’ is contemplative. With the recently announced Avatar Studios projects in development, it seems the Avatarverse is going to rapidly expand in future, and ‘Suki, Alone’ is the kind of story that shows why we should all be excited about that. It’s a vast world and it can be home to all kinds of stories. Be warned, this review is packed full of spoilers.

Created by Bryan Konietzko and Michael Dante DiMartino
Written by Faith Erin Hicks
Illustrated by Peter Wartman
Colored by Adele Matera
Lettered by Richard Starkings and Jimmy Betancourt

Suki is captured by the Fire Nation and brought to the Boiling Rock, a grim prison in the middle of a dormant volcano. Separated from Team Avatar and her Kyoshi Warrior sisters, she decides to build her own community among other prisoners. But it’s going to take more than an encouraging word to build trust among so many frightened people. Suki will need to draw on all her resources to do it, and even that might not be enough.

Enjoy all-new material from Faith Erin Hicks (The Nameless City; The Adventures of Superhero Girl) and Peter Wartman (Stonebreaker), with colors by Adele Matera. Written in consultation with original series writer Tim Hedrick!

Mark Tweedale: I’ve been excited about the “Avatar: The Last Airbender” comics doing one-shot character explorations for a while. I loved both ‘Katara and the Pirate’s Silver’ and ‘Toph Beifong’s Metalbending Academy,’ but ‘Suki, Alone’ always seemed like something special. Unlike the others, it isn’t a comedic one-shot. Following the tradition of TV episodes “Zuko Alone” and “Korra Alone,” it’s a very focused story about a character at a dark point in their life. ‘Suki, Alone’ explores her time in the Boiling Rock prison, where she spent most of her time during the third season of Avatar: The Last Airbender.

The other reason I was looking forward to this story is because of Suki herself. She’s a great character, but she’s always felt underused in both the show and the comics, so to take her and make her not just a main character but the main character is a very enticing prospect.

Paul Lai: For me, ‘Suki, Alone’ has so much going for it. Suki is the character I most wished had more screen time (as we touched on in one of our previous reviews), and “Zuko Alone” is a top five episode of the show for me. But that also brings high expectations for me as an avowed fan of this franchise.

You and I celebrated when they began this run of one-shot stories, departing from the three-chapter format that had been working since the first Dark Horse follow-ups to the TV series. It wasn’t that the old format wasn’t working, but that being able to tell varied stories would take advantage of how robust the Avatarverse really was. These singleton stories centered on Katara, Toph, and now Suki, have put that robustness to the test.

My initial verdict was a touch of surprise at how much ‘Suki, Alone’ is indeed like “Zuko Alone,” a kind of side episode centered on a single character, but quite woven into the bigger Avatar TV show arc. In fact, without giving too much away, it feels less like a standalone story and more like a redress of the lost opportunity, making up for how little the show gave airtime to Suki.

Mark: That’s a good point. I definitely agree there.

Paul: I’d go so far to say that, if I hadn’t recently rewatched Avatar: The Last Airbender (along with the rest of the US Netflix audience last summer), I probably wouldn’t have remembered the “before” and “after” of this story, and because of that, I’d probably have found it really unsatisfying and even obscure.

Instead, I think that shows where we are with the Avatarverse now. Not everything has to be a jumping-on point. Some reasonable expectation of background knowledge of the lore can be more or less expected. With the upcoming proliferation of Avatar stories from Netflix or Nickelodeon/Avatar Studios or wherever, I think it’s right to draw that line in the sand.

From that angle, I could appreciate ‘Suki, Alone’ as a really allusive and quite subtle story. No major chess pieces needed to be moved, so the tale could be pretty psychological, more of a character study. Maybe the worst way the original show overlooked Suki was to make her merely a convenient ally and an object of Sokka’s interest, less a subjectivity of her own. This story goes some distance to rectify that.

Mark: Oh, for sure. A big part of ‘Suki, Alone’ is the way her interior life takes center stage. So much takes place inside her head—in memories and in meditation—and I feel like the creators were very careful in the way they portrayed this material so that it felt stylistically consistent with “Zuko Alone” and “Korra Alone.” When I read this story, I could feel Suki’s isolation rather than just being told about it. Just looking at the layouts, you can see how they emphasize this, in some cases introducing extra white into the gutters, leaving panels isolated from others. It operates in a fairly obvious way, but then it feels like something that should be obvious, kind of in the same way that the show’s music could be very obvious—it’s purposeful and it forces the reader into Suki’s headspace without having to resort to thought bubbles.

Thought bubbles, while they can be useful in comics, aren’t a part of the language of the show. The show still pulled the viewer into the characters’ interior lives, but it mainly did so by making the internal aspects into external visual language. So when the comic employs this same limitation, it makes ‘Suki, Alone’ feel connected to the show, which is especially important in a story that takes place within a time period shared across two mediums.

And this doesn’t just apply to the way it approached isolation. There’s a nice moment when Suki is put into a tiny solitary confinement cell, and as she examines her living space, the panel is noticeably narrower than the tiers above and below to emphasize the claustrophobic environment.

Paul: I love the way you underscored what comics storytelling can contribute that would be harder on the show, with thought bubbles and panel/frame choices.

Mark: Even though ‘Suki, Alone’ is a one-shot and it’s about isolation, thematically it’s connected to the larger whole. Avatar: The Last Airbender has never just been an adventure show; it’s also about philosophy too. This story uses the isolationism of Kyoshi Island as a way to explore Suki’s off-screen development over seasons one and two, and how that development becomes her anchor while she’s imprisoned. It’s the part of herself that she holds onto and nourishes to stop herself succumbing to her base instincts.

Paul: Yes! It’s super interesting that this one-shot is in the “prison sojourn” genre of stories, which we’ve seen a good amount of with General Iroh on the show, or even somewhat with Kuvira in the “Legend of Korra: Ruins of Empire” graphic novels.

Accompanying those “mean jailers” and “inmate revolt” tropes of that genre, we also get those flashbacks to Suki’s origins. . . which is another trope of prison stories, because the imprisoned supposedly have so much time for introspection and memory while they stew or rot behind bars.

And again, if this was the first or even the fifth entry into Avatar comics, I would be like, “Hey, can’t we show off how great these stories are when they are grand scale and epic?” But instead, circling deeply into Suki’s situation and her place in this world. . . I’m here for it. Those are the deep wells these stories should be tapping into now.

Mark: As much as I love the epic trilogies, I’ve got a real soft spot for this sort of narrowly focused one-shot. I cannot state emphatically enough how much I love that a story like this can exist—eighty pages focused on a side character, with all the things we’re used to seeing in an Avatar story stripped away, and yet it is still undeniably an Avatar story.

When you think about it, “Avatar: The Last Airbender” is a licensed property, which means somewhere in the process there will be someone whose job is brand management. Whoever is doing that job and approved this story, without the Avatar, without any of the core characters, without world travel, without the crossbreed animals, without practically any of the things that make this series recognizable as a brand. . . that’s a gutsy choice. They saw the pitch for ‘Suki, Alone’ and decided it was a story worth telling.

Paul: Yes! Mark, you pointing out that this story was greenlit, despite how much it departs from the big cast and epic scale norms of these stories, gave me a deeper appreciation for what we’re seeing. The same variety of tone and change-up of pacing that kept the show interesting can also be expected from the comics, and hopefully all the future output from the font of Avatar Studios. That’s really promising to me.

Mark: Probably the most familiar “Avatar” element in ‘Suki, Alone’ ends up being the martial arts and the meditation. It’s the reader’s story anchor and it functions as Suki’s anchor too.Through mediation, Suki is able to tap into her core values and reaffirm who she is. I thought this was a fascinating story element, but what really made it spark to life was the way it’s a double-edged sword—it’s also painful for Suki to visit her sisters only in memory and meditation, emphasizing how cut off she is. There’s a certain amount of emotional pain involved for Suki to keep them alive in her head. ‘Suki, Alone’ sells the effort involved in holding on and the toll it takes on her. She does not have infinite inner strength to draw on.

On a slight tangent, I liked how the memories were used to show how different Kyoshi Island is from the rest of the Earth Kingdom. In “The Legend of Korra: Turf War,” there was a section that explored the way each culture reacted to homosexual relationships—for a long time the Earth Kingdom was considered the most repressive nation in this regard until Fire Lord Sozin’s decree that same-sex relationships were criminal.

But clearly Suki doesn’t feel that way, nor do any of the other Kyoshi Islanders. When Mingxia introduces her girlfriend, there’s no hesitation at all, no fear of judgement, which makes perfect sense when you consider they are from an island that venerates a bisexual avatar. This isn’t a major part of the story, but it’s a good piece of world building that was used to express characters and the tightly knit community of Kyoshi Island.

Paul: I was listening to the cool new “Avatar: Braving the Elements” podcast, hosted by Janet Varney (Korra’s voice actor) and Dante Basco (Zuko’s voice actor), and their discussions of the first episodes of the show reminded me that the show has always gloried in the joyfulness and hilarity of friendship and community against the alienation, competitiveness, and dehumanization of nationalism and conquest. From the moment Katara and Sokka find Aang and Appa broken out of the ice, Avatar: The Last Airbender has centered togetherness.

And I’d argue ‘Suki, Alone’ is no different. In Boiling Rock, Suki banks on found friendships and seeks alliances with trustworthy people. And her meditations to the past—and also to the future—where she discovers that she is NOT alone is an ode to how profoundly our identities are not just who we are ourselves, but that collective of people we carry inside us.

Ultimately, the story also vaults towards an unorthodox climax. We’re used to action-packed third acts, but ‘Suki, Alone’ reaches for something quite different. What did you think of it, Mark?

Mark: ‘Suki, Alone’ faces the challenge of being a story that fills a gap, and the problem with these sorts of stories is that they often don’t have an ending, they just sort of reach the point in which they reconnect with the main narrative again. And while ‘Suki, Alone’ isn’t immune to this problem, I like the way this element was used to comment on everything that preceded it.

Suki comes pretty close to breaking near the end of this story, but then Avatar Kyoshi appears. And she gives Suki hope—it’s a small thing, but just enough to make her hold on longer.

We’ve no idea how much time elapses between the vision and the arrival of Zuko and Sokka, but it gives weight to that moment when they enter the story, reconnecting with the TV show’s plotline, because that scene now communicates more than just reconnection to the main plot—it also communicates Suki’s inner strength. Suki didn’t break.

Paul: Yes! That was a surprise for me, an ending that rested on alluding, gesturing boldly toward the sweeping coda of the show rather than claiming a dramatic flourish of its own. We know where the Kyoshi warriors and the huge struggle against the Fire Nation will go, and ‘Suki, Alone’ almost poetically dissolves this solo story back into the fold of the larger narrative.

To me, it works because we got a satisfying detour with a character whose resolve and strength, especially when Suki reappears late in the show after these events, always seem unflappable and boundless. ‘Suki, Alone’ takes nothing away from Suki’s virtues while giving her character some vulnerability and a believable gauntlet for that toughness to form.

Perhaps most importantly for larger story mythos, though, ‘Suki, Alone’ also provides a critical bridge for how the pre-Aang era Kyoshi Warriors, in their need for a kind of isolation that mirrors Suki, follow her lead into the role that emerges for them afterwards.

In a way, then, ‘Suki, Alone’ is ironic as a title, because this isn’t about Suki alone at all. She’s sort of like the “rose that grew from concrete” (shout out to Tupac) who sums up and inspires a larger shift in the Kyoshi Warriors from the protective legacy of Avatar Kyoshi to the elite guard they are in ‘The Promise.’

Mark: After this story, which opened up so much of Suki’s character and her family of Kyoshi sisters, I’m not satisfied. I want more. After a story like this, I’m not going to be content to have Suki sit on the sidelines for long stretches of time. I’d love to see her become more actively involved in stories going forward. And given the way ‘Suki, Alone’ explores the way her attitude changed towards her responsibility to the world, I’d like to see her relationships with characters beyond Sokka get explored. Like, it’s not hard to see how this aspect of her personality would work really well with Aang in stories set post ‘Imbalance.’ And it’s something that could play off of Zuko really well too. I even want to see her in a room together with Mai. I feel like Suki’s personality could really push Mai’s buttons in some interesting ways and challenge her in ways Mai usually resists.

But I don’t want to see Suki go back on the shelf.

Paul: It seems like filling out Suki’s background in this story positions the character well for future forays from Avatar Studios. And yes, expanding the relational connections and contrasts will feel less like Suki playing a one-dimensional foil and more like some richly textured character interplay. Indeed, I could see that with Zuko, brought up in both huge privilege and cruel expectation. With Mai, and some of the way Mai’s change over the show’s arc has been enhanced by the comics. And more.

All this exemplifies to me how Suki stands to be a character pillar in the stories to come. I’m thrilled for that.

Final verdict: 9 – “Avatar: The Last Airbender—Suki, Alone” develops a key Avatarverse character on a solo journey that turns out deeply interconnected to the storyworld at large. It’s a story that emphasizes how versatile this world is for telling all kinds of stories.