“The Legend of Korra: Ruins of the Empire” Part 3

As of last Friday, Avatar: The Last Airbender is fifteen years old, so what better way to celebrate than to settle in to the latest Avatarverse comic? If you missed our previous reviews, you can find Part 1 here and Part 2 here. Be warned, full spoilers to follow.

Cover by Michelle Wong
with Killian Ng

Created by Bryan Konietzko and Michael Dante DiMartino
Written by Michael Dante DiMartino
Illustrated by Michelle Wong
Colored by Killian Ng and Adele Matera
Lettered by Ariana Maher

Thanks to Commander Guan and Doctor Sheng’s brainwashing technology, all hope for a fair election in the Earth Kingdom is lost. Korra works with Toph, Su, and Kuvira to plan a means to rescue not just the brainwashed Mako, Bolin, and Asami, but everyone else caught up in Guan’s plan!

Written by series co-creator Michael Dante DiMartino and illustrated by Michelle Wong (Goosebumps: Download and Die), with consultation by Bryan Konietzko and Tim Hedrick, this is the ultimate continuation of the beloved television series!

Paul Lai: A plot that has been swiftly developing comes to its climax in this third and last installment of ‘Ruins of the Empire,’ the second Dark Horse series to follow The Legend of Korra animated series.

I missed the opportunity to join you two for your review of Part 2 where you put your finger on the fact that this series revolves around Kuvira, a character who became a Season 4 antagonist and achieves some interesting depth in this follow-up. That character progression comes full circle in this part, and I found myself caring a lot about what ends up happening with Kuvira. One reason is that the character gets to have some depth and gets to be complicated, which is what I’ve always valued about Korra characters. But another reason is because of how Kuvira can symbolize the way an emerging democracy deals with unseated or deposed leaders with the requisite justice and mercy to set a standard for itself.

Excited to join you two in this review. What were your initial thoughts on this culminating Part 3, Mark and Nick?

Nicholas Palmieri: I genuinely never knew where the story was headed, and I mean that in the best possible way. I was engaged the entire time, never knowing quite what Kuvira was up to, or how the election would turn out, or to what extent the brainwashing could be reversed. Like you, Paul, I also found Kuvira the stand-out of the volume, but for a different reason. We’ll pick back up on that later, though.

Mark Tweedale: A very small part of me thought this three-parter could end on a cliffhanger, which would’ve been a break from Dark Horse’s usual format for the “Avatar” and “Korra” comics, because there was so much open at the end of Part 2 that I couldn’t see being wrapped up in a satisfactory manner in this volume. With such limited space, my feeling was that some shortcuts would have to be taken.

And I was right. There are some story shortcuts here… but oddly, I didn’t mind them. The big one was how to reverse the mind control damage, which was hand-waved away by Baatar Jr.’s genius. On its own, this probably would’ve bothered me, but the shortcut ended up being used to explore and deepen Kuvira, and since this arc is really hers, that’s a trade-off that works to the story’s benefit.

Paul: If I focus on the story mechanics, it does feel like an abrupt resolution, maybe a little too easy. But since I re-read the first two parts right before diving into this third, my mind was really on those moral and political dimensions at stake in Kuvira’s story.

I was pretty compelled by Kuvira’s arc as a character. As often occurs in these Avatarverse tales, a lot of political and social values are wrapped up in the treatment of one representative character, and the fate of Kuvira seems a fitting response to the idea of “the ruins of empire” signalled in the title. When society moves from one regime to another, how does reconstruction happen, and what do we do with the complicated moral implications of dealing with past enemies as military leaders and as human beings?

As we’ve come to expect from Avatar’s creators, these questions didn’t get brushed aside, nor were they labored over in a tiresome way for this type of entertainment. I wonder if you guys or other readers will feel like the story or the protagonists leaned too lenient or vindictive, but I appreciated the overall level of nuance to those questions, especially around Kuvira.

Nick: As we touched on last time, Kuvira defies easy definition. This is great on a few levels, first and foremost being that this helps make the story less predictable. On a deeper level, though, a lot of her complexity and contradictions come from the fact that she was learning about herself over the course of the story.

Redemption has long been an essential part of the Avatar universe, so we’ve seen a few different variations of the situation play out. Here, Kuvira was initially against seeking redemption. She would rather have stubbornly stood by her past mistakes than make any sort of compromise or admission of guilt. So it wasn’t until she began committing redemptive acts that she learned her ultimate lesson: one must not forget their mistakes; one can only accept and learn from them.

Note how it wasn’t until Kuvira owned up to her mistakes that everyone (most notably Opal) started to forgive her. In that sense, no, Paul, I didn’t find the characters’ reactions as overly lenient. It felt earned, and it also felt like there was a ways to go before full acceptance—she will still be under house arrest, after all.

In terms of her moral development, there was a great fake-out when she made her proposal to Guan, where her one condition was that he would help her forget any and all suffering she had caused. As it turns out, it was all part of her journey towards rejecting her stubborn mindset. But DiMartino left things a little open-ended in regards to when she decided to reject it. Did she initially escape Zaofu looking to have her memory erased, only to get there and realize she needed to own up to her mistakes? Did she only decide to betray Guan once she was put in the chair? Or was her plan always to betray Guan?

Mark: I feel it was the latter, if only because of the continued flashbacks to her youth. This was an element used throughout all three parts, but we only got the context to finally understand what they meant at the end. We’re shown a flashback of Kuvira being a cruel child, and we have to invent our own context to understand it, and it’s easy to jump to the conclusion that these flashbacks are showing us who Kuvira is at her core—that she can be callous and self-centered, the sort of person that would ask for Guan to erase her painful memories.

But that’s not what these flashbacks were about to Kuvira. Ultimately, these are moments when she was at her worst, and her adopted family still took her in, still cared for her, and didn’t give up on her. So in retrospect, every moment throughout this arc when those flashbacks arrive, those are the feelings Kuvira’s associating with them. This sort of complexity makes for a good read the first time through, but a noticeably richer reading the second time through.

Paul: Yes! Kuvira’s dance across the lines of our moral judgments and therefore our sympathies is a great storyteller’s feat in these three volumes, just as you two have broken down. Even without that richness in Kuvira’s character, “Ruins of Empire” would still be interesting to me as an examination of post-empire rearrangements and democratizing processes.

For instance, I love how the creators bring back the older Toph, love her characterization in this and the last chapters. But I was quite interested at the resolution of this story, how Earth Kingdom’s leaders decide to introduce representative voting processes more gradually. The story leads us to recognize the need to pace the development of a political culture and cultivate a field of governor candidates that does not necessitate a grouchy, reluctant, reclusive hero from the older series as the last, best hope. Although I might still be on board for canvassing for the Toph ticket.

My point, though, is that Kuvira’s uncertain narrative works super well not only in itself, but surrounded by the uncertainties of how best for Korra and company to lead in the aftermath of empire.

Nick: Agreed! Just as Kuvira needed to process recent events in a slow, organic way, so too does the establishment require the same, as do all the former supporters of her empire. Which brings us back to the brainwashing.

As Mark touched on earlier, the brainwashing ends rather easily, by having Baatar Jr. reverse-engineer a machine to undo the effects. I would have preferred if this had ended on a more open note. What if they couldn’t reverse the brainwashing of the populace? What if people refused to be un-brainwashed? How would Team Avatar react to that? That would speak more to the current, post-Cambridge Analytica world.

But I also understand avoiding those sort loose ends because of the release format. There were simply not enough pages to deal with that here, and a future trilogy, if there is one, will likely want to explore other ideas instead of going too in-depth on this one. To that end, the format of these books can sometimes be a hindrance, not allowing for the exploration of ideas that I’d love to see. Then again, maybe I’m just hungry for an answer, because the real world certainly doesn’t have one.

Mark: That point seems to come up a lot in these reviews. The format restricts the kinds of stories the team can tell. I want more of these graphic novel trilogies, but I think there’s room for other tales to co-exist.

Nick: There’s a world of possibilities in between a 10-page short story and a 216-page trilogy (206 possibilities!), so I agree that they should explore that in-between space.

Paul: Haha! All 206 possibilities! But for me, the format’s working. There’s a rhythm to these comics that I now value as much as the structural symmetry of the TV show. (And yet again, remember how much fun we had with “Team Avatar Tales”? Let’s build up the stories that could go in a collection like that for Korra!)

Mark: I’d enjoy that.

Now that we’ve got the whole picture for this arc, I feel like this is a story that’ll read better in the hardcover collection. ‘Ruins of the Empire’ circles back to its beginning, which made for a powerful ending, but at the same time, I read the beginning of this story back in May 2019, so it’s not exactly fresh in my mind. That said, I love what DiMartino and Wong have done here, especially in echoing lines of dialogue and panel layouts. It’s a powerful way to contrast the Kuvira at the beginning of the story against the Kuvira at its end.

Nick: I read the first part a few months ago, when preparing to review the second part, so things were a lot fresher in my mind. That said, I think great attention was put into making the panel from Part 1 memorable. You guys even talked about it as a stand-out panel in that first review because of its use of the “fish eye” perspective. A big part of what I’ve always loved about Avatar stories has been their attention to structure, so I’m sure this was planned from the beginning.

Mark: Oh, absolutely.

Paul: Mark’s astute observation of that “fish eye” moment in Part 1 was what made me recognize that callback in Part 3. I always read smarter when I read with Mark!

Maybe just as interesting to me is how the uniformly angry expressions on the background faces in Part 1 become a variety of ambivalent or approving faces in Part 3. The “fish eye” is also a good visual metaphor for seeing the whole of the kingdom through the Kuvira as a center of the drama.

Now that the story’s reached this resolution, I’m curious what you two thought of the artistry of this overall series?

Mark: I’ve been enjoying Michelle Wong’s work and I hope we’ll see her on the “Avatar” books again at some point. She shines brightest in her character work, which is the most important thing in this series. Her work is consistent with the characterization established in the show, and she knows how to handle the tiny shifts in a character, not just the broad ones.

Nick: Wong’s character work definitely shines more than any other aspect, but even that is so subtle that it can go by unnoticed. It wasn’t until a page late in the volume, where Asami chooses to forgive Kuvira, that I really noticed the subtleties of Wong’s facial expressions, and that was only because it’s a before-and-after shot from the same angle. The above image of Kuvira’s first and second trials is also a great example, as the panels take place 200 pages apart, but become far more powerful when you look at them together.

Mark: Unfortunately, on the art side of things I was let down by the lettering. I don’t know what went on behind the scenes, but Rachel Deering, who did the lettering on the last two parts, has been replaced by Ariana Maher, and there’s been no attempt to maintain a stylistic cohesion. Maher’s lettering is jarringly different from Deering’s—short-tailed speech balloons have become long-tailed, the shapes have become more oval. The sound effects in particular are completely different, and look much more computer-generated, lacking the organic quality of the Avatar world. I often found the sound texture and direction lacked finesse. So when Korra and Asami are talking and there’s a knock at the door…

…and the knocks have an erratic quality to them, with large O’s that suggest quite a hard knock, but in the next panel Suyin’s body language is gentle and reserved. The knock sounds are at odds with the tone of the scene.

In another section, Korra’s knocking on Bataar Jr.’s door, and the knock impact burst isn’t even coming from a place where her hand would be hitting. Also, the tail of the balloon should be curving the other way since Korra is both outside and off-panel. These aren’t major things, but it just means the spatial relationships of the sounds are a bit muddy.

I’ve said before, I wish that the “Avatar” comics would spend more time on the sound effects (I’d love them to do a first pass during the layout stage, especially in the fight scenes), but this latest installment seems to be going in the opposite direction. It’s almost like Maher didn’t have enough time to do her work. Coming off other books I’ve been reading lately, like “Gideon Falls,” “Isola,” and “Frankenstein Underground”—all of which have impeccable lettering—‘Ruins of the Empire, Part 3’ falls short of where it should be.

Honestly, I think this might be an art pipeline problem, because there are some panels with reading flow issues, like this panel, which should read “–then neither can you!” then KRUNCH! then “Mom!” but instead the KRUNCH! comes last because there’s no space for it to go anywhere else. It’s a problem that should’ve been caught at the layout stage.

Paul: Mark, when it comes to craft, you always help me notice the things I felt but couldn’t quite put a finger on.

Turning from craft to the story’s stakes now: The first Dark Horse Korra series, ‘Turf Wars,’ addressed a lot of unresolved questions about the nature of the spiritual and social in the TV series. But the political questions of ‘Ruins of Empire’ has me thinking much more about the global stakes and long-term future of the Avatarverse.

This led me to realize that, up until now, a notable feature of my reading experience of all these Avatarverse books, especially the “Avatar: The Last Airbender” comics, has been knowing the future that we are headed towards. But with these post-Korra books, we don’t know what comes next. We’re at the furthest edge of Avatarverse continuity.

That makes me curious what the creators have in their mental canon of where the world of Avatar goes. Do either of you have guesses? Is there something you’d like to see explored or explained?

Nick: My experience with this universe has been mostly linear, so things are a little different for me. I watched Avatar as it aired, then Korra as it aired, then fairly recently started reading “The Legend of Korra” comics, and I only circled back to read the first two “Avatar” trilogies a few months ago. So I can’t really speak to your experience, Paul.

But from a writing perspective, the mode of storytelling in the “Avatar” books is about filling in gaps, whereas the “Korra” books are simply stories. That change in craft interests me more than anything else, and I think it allows more freedom to cover topical issues like we’re already seeing. ‘Turf Wars’ had the freedom to explore LGBT issues, whereas that would have been odd in an “Avatar” book since the Korra show never acknowledged them. Likewise, the brainwashing plot in ‘Ruins of the Empire’ probably couldn’t exist in the “Avatar” comics for similar reasons (yes, Ba Sing Se dealt with brainwashing, but that was a very different situation).

Given that, I want them to keep exploring whatever topical issues arise in our world. I don’t know what the future holds in the real world, but I hope DiMartino and/or the future writer(s) stay relevant to whatever happens.

Mark: I think staying relevant is the key. That and keeping the characters alive. No one wants to zombie versions of the show’s characters just going through the motions. This remains the biggest strength of ‘Ruins of the Empire’ for me.

I’m curious about the future of the Avatarverse though. “Avatar: The Last Airbender—Imbalance” and now “The Legend of Korra: Ruins of the Empire” have both wrapped up, and yet nothing new has been announced. I was hoping that we’d get a burst of announcements for the show’s fifteenth anniversary this month.

Paul: I’ll wave the flag of that unmet hope as our petition to the creators. We’re obviously enamored with these stories and enjoy the vast space this well-developed world offers for entertaining and relevant storytelling.

Forgive me for more wonkiness, but particularly for Korra’s world, I think there’s a lot of room to continue exploring these different ways the industrialized modernity of the times conflicts with and consumes tradition, spirituality, cultural indigeneity, and harmony… and not necessarily in a pro-“march of progress” kind of way. The open-endedness of Avatar/Korra’s world may make it possible to imagine alternatives to that misleading sense of the inevitable triumph of how we live today, how our world is today. I’m not sure the specifics on what I’m thinking of, but I’m interested to see where these next stories can take us.

Mark: Same. We should probably wrap this up. For me, this is a 7.5. I wanted to go higher, but the lettering issues held this one back for me—I need the visual continuity. Kuvira’s journey toward redemption (and I say toward deliberately, because this story stresses this is the beginning of a process) was something I really connected with. Yeah, I felt like the brainwashing and political side of things could be explored further, but I suspect that’ll show up in future arcs. Recontextualizing Kuvira’s flashbacks ended up being the best part of this arc though and it retroactively made the previous two parts better.

Nick: Yeah, 7.5 here, too: lower than Part 1 (which you two gave an 8) but higher than Part 2 (which Mark and I gave a 7). Kuvira’s story kept me on my toes, and the themes resonated so strongly with me that I can forgive any mild visual deficiencies.

Paul: To me, ‘Ruins of Empire’ continues the Dark Horse Avatarverse’s unstinting depth of storytelling and expansion of the storyworld in enticing new directions. The artistic craft has also remained high quality, but we probably agree that us fans have deep devotion to the franchise, which we hope merits good custodianship from story to sound effects.

Final verdict: 7.5 – ‘Ruins of Empire’ is a worthy addition to the Avatarverse canon. Its ending may be a little too neat in places, but it definitely satisfies the core elements, especially where Kuvira is concerned.