Team Avatar are starting to grow up in this new series.
Story by Gene Luen Yang, Michael Dante DiMartino, and Bryan Konietzko
Script by Gene Luen Yang
Illustrated by Gurihiru
Lettered by Michael HeislerAvatar Aang asks his friends to help him honor Yangchen’s Festival—one of the highest Air Nomad holidays, which hasn’t been celebrated in over one hundred years.
But cryptic visits from the spirit of Avatar Yangchen herself lead Aang to discover a jointly owned Fire Nation and Earth Kingdom refinery—operating on land sacred to the Airbenders! Is this the cause of the pollution Aang finds there, or is a more mysterious menace afoot?
Before I start reviewing this, you should probably know this about me: I love the hell out of Avatar. So much so that I’ve marathoned all 61 episodes of the original series over two days… (Everyone involved agreed afterwards it was an excellent idea. I totally recommend this.) You should also know that Toph Beifong is my favourite character, so this volume is really playing right to my soft spots.
My immediate reaction going into this was, “Wow, everyone’s gotten so tall.” Right there on page one, Aang’s standing next to Iroh and he’s half a head taller than him. It’s a little startling at first, yet at the same time familiar. With the original TV series, there was always a shake-up going into a new season, where the characters’ looks would change. This feels very much like that. There’s a few flashback sequences in this volume too, and they put the changes in the characters into stark contrast. It’s a nice touch, and underscores the theme of change present throughout this volume.
The next thing that hit me was how much this book felt like Avatar. It seems whenever it’s been a while since I’ve read one of these, I forgot how effortlessly* it pulls me back into the world, especially in the character moments. I hear the characters in my head as if the voice actors are giving me their own personal reading of the lines. Gene Luen Yang and Gurihiru have real strength in their dance of dialogue combined with character acting. No line is delivered without purpose. Gurihiru in particular have a excellent read on how subtle or broad to play the acting, which always had a broad spectrum in the original show.
The bending in this one feels right to me at last. In The Promise, and even at times in The Search, I could feel the struggle of trying to capture the familiar motion from the show in static images. Here, especially in the factory sequences, the bending had a palpable weight and motion to it. A bulk of that is Gurihiru refining what they’ve learnt over the last three years they’ve been doing this thing, but another part of that is Michael Heisler’s sound effects. Especially in the sequence with the earthbender factory guards, he uses colour and shape to define what kind of bending is being done, and pushes the letters around the panels to translate the movement of the sound. This is sound in stereo, moving throughout the space, and without this approach to sound effects, I don’t think the bending would come to life in quite the same way as it does here.
In fact, the only thing that feels like a core element missing is Jeremy Zuckerman’s score. Oh well, I’ll just play my copy of the score for The Legend of Korra – Book One: Air…
In terms of story, this book was either going to go very well or very badly for me, because front and centre in this one is Toph, and if she wasn’t done right, I would’ve been rather annoyed. But that was never going to be the case. Gene Yang gets Toph in the way that I as a fan can’t help feeling like she must be one of his favourites, if not his favourite character altogether. Her discomfort with traditions (That’s just how it’s done) rings true in a way that makes this comic feel every bit as valid as the TV series. This isn’t lesser Avatar, it’s just a different lens through which to explore the world. The show was always able to be light and fun, even downright silly when it needed to be, while at other times really digging deep with its characters, and here is no different. Toph’s discomfort is played for comedy when she has to deal with the Air Acolytes, but there’s something very real beneath all that.
Continued belowIn particular there was a flashback sequence with Toph and her parents in which the panel borders changed from their usual perfect horizontal and vertical lines to diagonal lines, giving the scene a fractured feeling, like broken glass, especially as it pushed in tighter on Toph and tears formed in her eyes. It was a great moment of composition carrying the emotional component of the story in a powerful way.
This first volume is setting up a lot of interesting conflicts, especially between Aang and Toph, which means that even at eighty pages, it still felt much too short. The wait until July is going to be a difficult one, but when the results are this good, it’s totally worth it.
Final Verdict: 8. A great set-up. I look forward to seeing it escalate and get messy.
*Not actually effortless at all. Everyone is working very hard to make the effort invisible.
