Go to: Fusion, by Juana Medina
3/26/2016
The Sculptor
The Sculptor reminded me of that final bit from the 1984 film Amadeus when the aging composer Antonio Salieri realizes that he will never be remembered as anything more than another humdrum talent. So he declares himself the patron saint of mediocrity and absolves everyone around him of their own unremarkable qualities. Scott McCloud seems to be engaging in a somewhat similar act in this tortured, just shy of 500 pages, meditation on the nature of art, fame, and his own place in the comics pantheon. Not that McCloud makes any direct reference to himself in the story. His main hero David Smith is a failed sculptor, the running gag being that he shares his name with a real-life famous sculptor and dozens of anonymous people living in New York city. But David expresses some very definite ideas about art that will be recognizable to readers of McCloud’s Understanding Comics. Since that book’s publication, McCloud has acquired a reputation for being a notable comics theorist. But The Sculptor marks a much-heralded return to professional fiction writing after more than a decade’s absence, not to mention a test case for McCloud to put his own theories into practice. Dave himself starts out in a creative rut, and spends much of the book fighting his inner demons, which are an emotionally crippling blend of self-loathing and uncompromising perfectionism.
David is sort of an angrier, older version of Jenny Weaver from Zot! Despite being a reasonably good-looking guy, he’s too much of a social misfit to make friends, let alone get a girl to go out with him. More regrettably for him, he's burned almost all of his bridges to the highly competitive New York art scene. As he’s wallowing in self-pity, David receives a visitation from Death itself in the form of favorite uncle Harry. He’s then offered two options: Live a long and happy life in total obscurity, or make his mark on the world in the next 200 days before dying. When David chooses the latter, Harry imbues him with a superpower which will make it easy to mold any material into any shape or form - a useful skill for a sculptor.
Unfortunately, this is where the story begins to unravel a bit. But let’s first talk about the book’s virtues. McCloud has had a lot of time to hone his craft. Though not a particularly strong figure artist, here he doesn’t shrink from the arduous task of portraying dozens of very different individuals. And the results pay off. Even secondary and background characters feel well-thought out. And for a story set in New York, McCloud does a great job in capturing the city’s crowded conditions and diverse settings. The dark blue duotone palette combined with his scratchy linework produces a certain gritty, timeless appeal to the great metropolis. And his choice of viewing his characters from above in many panels conveys the imposing scale of the city’s architecture.
And the book is an engrossing page turner. The 200-day time limit creates plenty of tension to keep the reader guessing as to whether David will be able to sculpt anything memorable before the deadline, or whether he’ll be able to find a way out of his Faustian bargain. The Sculptor becomes increasingly cinematic as McCloud employs every panel-to-panel transition technique and nonlinear narrative device he’s outlined in the past to manipulate the flow of time within the story.
But McCloud has a habit of trading in archetypes that prevents him from shaping more believable characters. As a mouthpiece for McCloud’s aesthetic philosophy, it’s a laudable choice that David starts out as such an unsympathetic individual. His tendency to view the world from the vantage of moral absolutes and his initial complaint that he doesn’t have the chops to translate his vision into real art will be all too familiar to anyone who's hung around in an art school setting. There’s just a certain rigidity in execution that doesn’t allow McCloud to develop his character in unexpected ways or to acquire a more nuanced world view. At one point, David becomes a guerrilla artist. But this doesn’t mark any greater engagement with anyone outside of his small circle, or an increase in social awareness. He’s essentially still the same mopey individual, only now he’s defacing public property. This makes the book’s cheaply melodramatic conclusion kind of irritating. Even if David’s final artistic statement isn’t supposed to be a great masterpiece (which it clearly isn’t), does he still have to be so obnoxious about it?
Exacerbating David’s insufferable high mindedness is that for a college trained New York artist, he’s kind of crappy at what he does. That’s because his works look less like what a mediocre artist would produce than a cartoonist’s half-assed ideas about sculpture. For all their superficial similarities to abstract expressionism, they’re too pictorial, too tied up to a specific narrative, with not enough thought about their 3D qualities. A snooty critic compares them to a Polynesian gift shop. I’d say David’s sculptures have more in common with the PVC statues and action figures sold in comic conventions than the works found in an obscure student art gallery. This highlights McCloud’s artistic limitations. His style doesn’t quite succeed in projecting that sense of mass and volume needed to properly portray on the page David’s chosen medium.
The Sculptor actually devotes very little of its 500 pages to David’s creative process, and more to the love story between him and the enigmatic Meg. in my review of Zot! I noted how Zot was largely devoid of an inner life. His main job was to pull Jenny out of her misery. This is exactly the same with Meg and David. He first meets her playing an angel in a public performance piece, and she quickly becomes his muse. Meg’s so much of a savior figure that she even initiates David into certain mysteries of sex and how to relate to an actual functioning adult. Yeesh! To his credit, McCloud doesn’t make Meg half as ebullient as Zot. But his attempts to make her a more rounded personality are clunky in their delivery, particularly the introduction of her bipolar disorder. It still fails to impart Meg with much individual agency, let alone a complex inner life. So it turns into just another thing David has to deal with and work through on his way to making his deadline.
As for the art market David desperately wants to become a part of while constantly throwing shade at it, many of the attacks he levels at it are pretty familiar: Its disconnect from the rest of the world. The fixation on celebrity. A concern for economic value that overides artistic merit. But there’s something about the dogmatic proscription about what defines art combined with the book’s penchant for sentimental portrayal that comes across as immensely self-indulgent. And that ultimately ends up reinforcing the system it critiques.
3/17/2016
3/11/2016
If You Steal
Colors: Hubert
Cover Design: Keeli McCarthy
If You Steal is the third compilation of short stories from Norwegian cartoonist John Arne Sæterøy, aka Jason, to be published for the English language market. In many ways, this is his most accessible book. Almost all of the eleven stories use some kind of hook based on popular genre conventions. His treatment to these elements is playful, at least for a Jason comic. On display is his usual inimitable style: The anthropomorphic characters with the deadpan expressions and hunched poses. The middle distance perspective. The unvarying four panel grid. Decompressed silent panels. The sparse detail of his clear line. All the stories make for a quick read. But the variety of subject matter and execution on display hints at the inventiveness that belies his outwardly uncomplicated drawings.
Take the lead story “If You Steal”, A crime drama about a lowlife forced to commit to one more heist in order to pay off some huge gambling debts - the usual setup. The melancholic tone and sense of inevitable tragedy will be familiar to readers of his past collections. But the entire narrative is broken down into one page vignettes recounted out of sequence. Each page is an example of economic storytelling. But put together, they give the reader just enough information, not to mention a few ambiguous Magritte imagery, to piece together the broad stroke of events.
The playfulness continues with “Karma Chameleon”, a homage to those 1950s sci-fi B-movies featuring giant monsters which are actually just normal animals being obviously enlarged through the era’s cheap film effects. The story features the usual cast of characters: the hero, the local sheriff, an eccentric scientist, and his beautiful daughter. And there’s the predictable showdown between monster and military. But the eccentric scientist can’t even keep on topic, preferring to talk about masturbation to anyone he can corner.
Jason then turns his attention in "Lorena Velazquez" to another 1950s movie tradition - Mexican films starring lucha libre wrestlers like Santo battling all manner of supernatural horrors, because why not? The story is fairly straightforward, with the masked hero entering a castle to rescue a damsel in distress. He takes out a couple of hooded henchmen. But things quickly become chaotic as he confronts a vampire, a Frankenstein monster, a horde of mummies, a wolfman, all manner of aliens, even Adolph Hitler himself. It’s absolutely nuts.
Come to think about it, many of the stories riff off famous mid-20th century figures: Frida Kahlo is an assassin who works for the mob, a mashup of Brigitte Bardot and Samuel Beckett’s famous play Waiting for Godot, the Van Morrison album Moondance reimagined as a series of 1950s horror comic book covers, a story about jazz musician Chet Baker, or the most ludicrous theory linking the assassination of John F. Kennedy to 9/11. It’s a fairly wide sampling of pop culture, all of which may have shaped Jason’s sensibilities.
Jason’s visuals are usually so consistent that I couldn't discern if these stories were originally published together, or if they were assembled from disparate sources. Unfortunately, Fantagraphics doesn't supply any information within the book's pages. Whatever the case, this is as good an introduction as any to the artist’s peculiar blend of surface kitsch and sardonic humor. Though in the closing story “Nothing”, Jason seems to do away with any outside reference in order to tell a humane and disturbing tale of frailty.
3/06/2016
2/29/2016
2/28/2016
2/26/2016
The Star Wars
Art: Mike Mayhew
Additional Art: Scott Kolins, Sean Cooke, Killian Plunkett, Stephane Roux, Ryan Kinnaird
Colors: Rain Beredo, Dan Jackson
Letters: Michael Heisler
Covers: Nick Runge, Jan Duursema, Douglas Wheatley, Ralph McQuarrie
Design: Jimmy Presler
Star Wars created by George Lucas.
(Mild spoiler alert for the entire Star Wars film series)
As with any successful franchise, Star Wars constantly tempts fans to speculate about the inner workings of its creative process prior to the reveal of the finished product. This is further exacerbated by George Lucas and his pronounced habit of constantly revising his own story. Did he always intend to produce six movies or nine? When did he decide to make Emperor Palpatine a Sith Lord? Or settle on the familial connection between Luke Skywalker, Leia Organa and Darth Vader? The franchise is maddeningly slippery to anyone who insists on the existence of eternal truths (e.g. Han Solo shot first!), which sets them in opposition to the equally obstinate Lucas. So it’s not surprising that some people would be curious to read the legendary rough draft to what would become the original Star Wars from 1977, if only just to understand what ideas were percolating within Lucas head at the time. But for those of us who can’t be bothered to track it down, Dark Horse published a graphic novel adaptation back in 2013 written by J.W. Rinzler and drawn mainly by Mike Mayhew.
Needless to say, this is not the story that would go on to conquer the world and change popular culture. The Star Wars is a very workmanlike effort that even more obviously owes a debt to Flash Gordon. Events unfold in a typically serialized manner, with the protagonists facing down one peril after another. It’s often been rumored that the rough draft contained elements for the original trilogy, but this adaptation implies that this is also true for the prequels as well. The setup of the New Galactic Empire conquering the rebellious planet Acquilae mirrors the Trade Federation’s aggression towards Naboo in The Phantom Menace. The attempts to protect a young Princess Leia from Imperial forces anticipate similar actions towards Queen Amidala. The Wookie uprising in the latter part of the comic foresees the participation of the Ewoks and the Gungans in the film series.
But the sprawling structure makes it too unwieldy to work as a feature film. The films would have to compress events and merge characters. No less than four separate people are combined to fashion the Darth Vader fans know and love. It’s not exactly clear how much of Lucas draft informs Rinzler’s script, but the narrative is all plot and zero characterization. Individuals act out not from some internal motive but because they need to do so to move things along. The dialogue is mainly expository with some technobabble intruding into the proceedings. No one possesses any personality of note. So it’s hard to care about what happens to anyone. The reader is only aware when someone is in love because they proclaim it. Some characters make the ultimate sacrifice and their deaths are barely mourned. Others just drop out altogether. The pacing allows no room for quiet introspection. At best, this is uninspired, mechanical storytelling.
None of this does any favors to Lucas half-baked critique of American imperialism. The New Empire, which is somehow different from the previous Empire, is now evil because it persecutes the Jedi and the worlds that harbor them. There are a few attempts to insert some realpolitik that go nowhere. And the portrayal of the Wookies as stereotypical primitives who can be duped into worshipping someone as a god, à la the Ewoks in Return of the Jedi, only demonstrates how much a younger Lucas was a man of his time. For him, anyone who wasn't a droid or a funny-looking alien (Han happens to be big and green) was by default white.
Mayhew and colorist Rain Beredo attempt to insert into the proceedings some much needed vim and vigour, while letterer Michael Heisler employs fonts recalling the classic look of the film. But they can’t overcome the indifferent scripting. The photorealism can even sometimes hinder the flow of the comic due to the regular use of exaggerated but frozen facial expressions. No matter how hard the art team tries to make the characters look and act like actual human beings the reader can relate to, they remain inert and unengaging.
Because of the comic’s origins, the art becomes oddly metatextual. The designs are attempting to recreate the ideas of Lucas and original concept designer Ralph McQuarrie before they acquired their more recognizable onscreen forms. But Mayhew et al. is obviously drawing inspiration from the original trilogy. The end result is a world that gradually appears more familiar as the story progresses, though more retro in feel. It’s as if someone had wiped away all the dirt and grime from the Star Wars universe. Or maybe the dirt and grime had not yet enough time to settle in.
What ultimately distinguishes, or diminishes, The Star Wars in the eyes of fans are the ideas that don’t make it into this version of the story. The Jedi and Sith are ancient enemies, but their feud doesn’t play a central role in the war between the New Empire and the Rebellion. The Sith and the Empire might be allies for the sake of convenience, but the latter barely tolerates the former. Both warrior cults are viewed as moribund institutions being swept away by the modern state. This contempt for the old actually makes its way into the original film, only to vanish when the sequels would reveal that the Sith were actually running the show.
Also nonexistent is the quasi-spiritualism associated with the franchise. While Jedi and Sith are formidable in battle, neither possesses any supernatural abilities. The Force as understood by modern fandom has yet to be conceived by Lucas. There are no sermons about “an energy field created by all living things” binding the galaxy together. Or dire warnings about being tempted by the Dark Side by giving into anger, fear, and aggression. Without The Force, the comic lacks the pseudo-philosophical content that has become an essential part of the Star Wars universe.
Perhaps the most significant absence is of its hero Luke Skywalker. There's a character with that name in the comic, though that’s where the similarity ends. This Luke is a seasoned Jedi warrior. The last of a dying breed, somewhat akin to an aging samurai still in active service after the collapse of the shogunate. Luke's fighting for the status quo he remembers. Noble perhaps, but a doomed cause. He's really more the template for Obi-Wan Kenobi. Quite a a far cry from the Luke the world would come to know as a naive farmboy who desperately wants to leave the farm and his hick family. Who daydreams about adventures in space, and perhaps of a better tomorrow. That’s the aspirational character many fans would embrace.
2/25/2016
Cartoon: The Uncanny Adventures of (I Hate) Dr. Wertham
Go to: OSU Libraries, by Sterling South & David Wigransky. Posted by Carol Tilley & Caitlin McGurk (via Tom Spurgeon)
2/14/2016
Lulu Anew
Translation: Joe Johnson
Letters: Ortho
The central conceit of the midlife crisis is that it's often used as an excuse to engage in melodrama. The protagonist chucks their stifling responsibilities and rigidly defined social roles in order to indulge in the kind of youthful indiscretions that they’ve generally avoided in the past. Or in more recent stories, as a chance to launch into a personal quest for self-actualization. Throw in some unsympathetic parents, small-minded acquaintances, or an uncomprehending spouse/significant other, and the elements are in place to send the hero on their merry way. The eponymous protagonist of Lulu Anew starts out in the usual pattern. Lulu is a French housewife and mother of three attempting to return to the workforce. But after going through another unsuccessful job interview, something about coming back to her lout of a husband causes her to hesitate. Before long, she's gone on a walkabout to the Coast without any concrete plans and without informing anyone.
If this sounds like the setup for American Beauty or Eat Pray Love, Lulu Anew couldn’t be further away from those predecessors. Unlike her American counterparts, Lulu isn't trapped in some materially comfortable but emotionally hollowed out middle class existence. Affluence is definitely not an issue for her. From all appearances, she needs the money to support her family. And a job would allow her to escape the confines of her claustrophobic domestic situation as a put upon housewife. But Lulu can’t actually afford to run away from home. She only manages to survive by relying on the kindness of strangers.
And unlike Hollywood’s screen idols, there’s nothing glamorous about Lulu. Étienne Davodeau draws in the Franco-Belgian tradition, which grounds the otherwise unlikely story in a naturalistic setting. Most of his adult characters look like they’re at least middle aged, with eye bags, wrinkles, frown lines, and flabby bodies. Lulu herself is hardly the vision of beauty with her flat unattractive features, drab clothes and unkempt hair tied back into a utilitarian knot. There’s an unmistakable working class bearing to Davodeau’s cast. At some point, Lulu acquires a love interest in the form of an ex-con trailer park groundskeeper named Charles. He vaguely recalls a schlubby Harvey Pekar as drawn by Robert Crumb, but with the addition of a pair of unfortunate sideburns. That’s nothing compared to his hairier two brothers who live in the park with him.
The book’s other main character is the placid French coastline. Drawn with virtuosity by Davodeau, the setting’s warm orange and cool blue color washes define the overall palette. While the book's page layout uses the twelve panel grid, Davodeau often employs silent action sequences to punctuate the narrative. The further Lulu travels, the more often the panels open up to wide angle shots of the distant horizon. The natural beauty of the landscape beckoning her into a state of wordless introspection as she watches the waves quietly roll onto land.
This tranquil mood keeps the book from wallowing in cheap sentimentality. Lulu doesn’t betray any unambiguous emotions about her rash decision to leave her family such as guilt, remorse, or joy and relief. She doesn’t pursue any unfulfilled ambitions, engage in bucket-list inspired feats of daring, or travel to exotic places. Her interactions with the locals are a lot more low key, and the personal revelations about what drives her come gradually.
The narrative is actually told from the perspective of Lulu’s friends and family. The story begins with several of them gathered around a table at dusk, for reasons only revealed at the end of the book, trying to piece together the events into a cohesive whole. While some convey the fallout from Lulu’s sudden disappearance, one particular friend named Xavier and Lulu’s teenage daughter Morgane supply much of the story’s spine. They’re generally a relaxed group. And their attitude exerts a powerful pull on the book’s mood. While they don’t all necessarily agree with Lulu’s behavior, they approach the events from the standpoint of inquiry rather than of judgement. As the conversation unfolds, each member drops subtle hints about the unhappiness that might have contributed to the commencement of Lulu’s journey.
Regardless of where the reader falls on the wisdom (or lack) of her actions, Lulu Anew taps into a strain of discontent that comes from living a circumscribed life, and the need to occasionally rebel against it by searching for the liminal.
2/10/2016
1/30/2016
Ultraman Vol. 2
Art: Tomohiro Shimoguchi
Ultraman created by Eiji Tsuburaya & Tsuburaya Productions
The second volume of the Ultraman manga reboot is paced exactly like the previous one, with smaller scenes building up to a massive decompressed fight beginning at the halfway point. But the action begins sooner, even as the manga continues the process of reintroducing elements from the original TV series while expanding the cast of supporting characters. In the last volume, it was revealed that original Ultraman host Shin Hayata had been permanently altered by his time bonding with the Giant of Light so that he retained a portion of the mysterious alien’s powers. Even more inexplicably, he passed those abilities on to his only son Shinjiro. Now that Shin has been injured in his battle with old nemesis Bemular, will Shinjiro take up the mantle of his father and continue to defend the planet from alien threats? This volume gives a definitive answer, but not before raising a whole host of thorny issues about the new Ultraman’s true purpose. Volume one ended with the introduction of this strange being:
Fans of the TV series will recognize this Edo to be a member of a race of evil aliens who were once Ultraman’s mortal enemies. So why is he not just a member of the Special Science Search Party, a.k.a the Science Patrol, but actually the one giving the orders? Since when has the SSSP become a covert organization, with its own complement of Men in Black covering up the existence of aliens? And how does Shinjiro fit into their plans?
The people who will probably end up helping him in getting to the bottom of this conspiracy are Endo, a determined police detective, and Rena, a teen idol and Ultraman superfan. Acting as foil is taciturn SSSP agent Moroboshi. At this point, everyone’s personality is broadly defined. Endo’s dislike for blindly following orders is going to get him into trouble with the bad guys. Rena’s nothing more than a damsel-in-distress and potential love interest. And Moroboshi is a dick towards Shinjiro because he’s the workplace newbie. Shinjiro himself still lacks any agency as the reluctant hero following in his father’s footsteps. He’s likeable in his desire to do the right thing, which makes it easy for Edo to manipulate him.
The most obvious departure from the entire franchise is that the new Ultraman is no longer the result of a magical transformation. Shinjiro has to don an armored suit built by the SSSP to fully replicate all of Ultraman’s superpowers. This has a number of significant consequence for the manga. This Ultraman now works for The Man, so he loses most of his customary independence. Gone is the larger-than-life kaiju-battling action, replaced by street-level violence. Shinjiro has to spend half the time worrying about keeping the fight away from innocent bystanders or rescuing trapped civilians. And the now human-sized enemies behave more like criminals and terrorists attempting to blend into the general population than traditional world-conquering villains. The true big bad could be hiding anywhere, including the SSSP. This is a superhero for a more paranoid era.
1/26/2016
1/23/2016
Just So Happens
In the debut graphic novel of Fumio Obata Just So Happens, Japanese transplant Yumiko has made the city of London her home for the last several years while working at a design firm. As she walks to work, she monologues about preferring the “noise, chaos, busyness, energy, and openness…” , and in being immersed in a place crammed with different lives “with different roots and cultures.” To emphasize her point, Obata (he is also a Japanese transplant living in Great Britain) pulls back to reveal a bird’s eye view of Yumiko surrounded by London’s varied denizens. Yumiko exultantly proclaims “And somehow I managed to create my own little space too.” This is the familiar claim of any immigrant who has done good. But there’s a price to pay for her successful assimilation. Whenever she spots her compatriots on those crowded streets, Yumiko subconsciously recoils from their presence. It takes her boyfriend innocently pointing this out for Yumiko to notice, and she becomes flustered at her own behavior. Soon enough, Yumiko is forced to confront her discomfort when a sudden death in the family forces her to return to her home country in this elegant and understated story about how hybrid cultural identity functions within a globalized framework.
These themes have been tackled before by Adrian Tomine and Gene Luen Yang. But there’s less interest in how racial discrimination divides mainstream society from immigrant communities which looms large with Obata’s American counterparts. Neither does he explore the politics of escaping from the repression of the old world found in Marjane Satrapi. Obata eschews those stark binaries. What is going on in his story is much more mundane and personal. At first glance, Yumiko has very little in the way of defining characteristics. Her ability to blend into her environment has made her fairly unremarkable. But as she performs her duties during the funeral service, her experience of reverse culture shock leads to some very subtle changes over the course of the book. She looks on with dismay at the many petty details of the ceremony she has to deal with, initially rejects the customs of a culture now alien to her, only to later reassess how her relationship with her separated parents contributed to her decision to study, then later work abroad. In the end, there are no overt changes or melodramatic conflicts. Just a quiet rapprochement with the country and family Yumiko had long believed she had long outgrown. In its interiority, JSH possesses a meditative autobiographical quality.
If the story sounds a little too thin, much of its emotional impact comes from the wonderful art which combines European-style illustration with Japanese aesthetics and subject matter. Obata’s meticulous ink lines are overlaid with luminous watercolor washes to produce an impressionistic effect. Once the story moves to Japan, the results are almost magical. The setting is rendered with a quiet dreamlike quality, particularly the abstract-looking mountainous landscapes. As much as Yumiko feels disconnected from her surroundings, it’s virtually impossible not to feel a little captivated by the country’s natural and architectural beauty. Obata does like to regularly pull away from his characters and view them from overhead. This transforms the ordinary urban settings they inhabit into a strange floating world.
Given that much of the story takes place inside Yumiko’s head, the most important character after her, not to mention its most prominent visual motif, is a masked Noh theater performer whose act she once witnessed during a summer festival. Drawn to the performer’s ability to balance stillness and dynamism, fierceness and control, Yumiko is haunted by its ghost when she returns to Japan. Her own detached sorrow during the funeral becomes mirrored by the anonymity of the performer’s mask, as well the slow, mournful and ambiguous gestures. The theater's restrained beauty and codified movements exquisitely captured by Obata are an expression of a search for a transcendental realm which subsumes the individual ego. As she struggles to separate her own desires from the conflicting advice offered by her mother and father on how to live her life, the performer invades her space, and she intermittently enters into the spiritual plane where she comes face-to-face with not just the performer, but her own previously unacknowledged emotional turmoil. These are the most intense scenes within the book, and Obata’s otherwise cool palette becomes warmer, harsher and more vivid.
And afterwards, Obata offers no grand theories or sweeping statements addressing the turmoil experienced by many transplants arising from their liminal status. Only simple observations perhaps drawn from his own life. These are lessons he finds best explored through the eclectic language of a visual artist.
1/22/2016
1/08/2016
Star Wars: Shattered Empire
Art: Marco Chechetto, Angel Unzueta, Emilio Laiso, Phil Notto
Colors: Andres Mossa
Letters: Joe Caramagna
Star Wars created by George Lucas
Journey to Star Wars: The Force Awakens: Shattered Empire is one of the media tie-ins to the The Force Awakens written by Greg Rucka covering the thirty year gap since the end of Return of the Jedi. While the four issue series does feature the main protagonists from the older film, its purpose is to set the stage for the events of TFA via the introduction of a few new characters who will never be seen or heard from again. Their personal connection to one of the film's cast members will be immediately recognizable to anyone who’s seen TFA . But as with most tie-ins, the revelation is more of an afterthought retrofitted into the timeline with no noticeable effect.
If the comic drives home one point, it’s that the conclusion of ROTJ didn’t spell the end of hostilities between the film’s two warring factions: The Empire and the Rebel Alliance. The story begins in media res with the final stages of the fateful Battle of Endor, but seen through the eyes of a young married couple. Shara Bey is a crack A-wing fighter pilot participating in the Rebel Alliance attack on the second Death Star, while Kes is one of the commandos led by Han Solo during the concurrent ground assault on its force field generator. They're reunited at the victory celebrations on Endor, and begin to look forward to civilian life and raising a family.
It's not long before those plans are put on hold. Now on the losing side of the intergalactic struggle and acting on posthumous orders from Emperor Palpatine, the scattered Imperial forces are nevertheless determined to make the Alliance pay dearly for every world they liberate. Shara and Kes are separated for such long stretches by their respective deployments that Shara begins to feel torn between her loyalty to the Alliance and her desire to lead a more peaceful existence. The comic arrives at a satisfactory solution to the couple's predicament in the end, while leaving the greater conflict between good and evil still very much in the air since this is something being addressed in the film.
Naturally, the story contains a number of continuity nods. The more obvious ones include a mission to wrest the planet Naboo from the Empire led by Leia Organa which acknowledges The Phantom Menace as officially still a part of the Star Wars canon. Then there’s a mission led by Luke Skywalker to retrieve a sacred Jedi object which references The Clone Wars and foreshadows his enigmatic role in TFA. These actions might still have repercussions in the upcoming films of the franchise or, as more likely the case, they could just be empty filler. But within the context of the comic alone, their plot threads are largely disconnected from one another. The more established characters Han, Leia and Luke et al, aren’t clearly fleshed-out, dependent largely on readers’ pre-existing emotional investment from watching the original Star Wars trilogy.
If there’s any reason to buy this comic, it’s the gorgeous Star Wars space battle porn. A few other artists get involved, and the resulting visual contrast in their styles can be jarring. But Marco Chechetto handles the bulk of the pages. His interpretation of faces can come across as a little too smooth and static, but he possesses a serious command of the futuristic technology, especially the franchise’s numerous spaceships. His action set pieces are densely packed without sacrificing legibility. And his art lends a certain grittiness that enhances the impression of a lived-in universe vital to the franchise. Colorist Andres Mossa holds things together with a subdued but eerily artificial palette that bathes the technology in fluorescent blues and the natural world in umbers and sepias. Overall, Chechetto and Mossa come closer to replicating the visual aesthetic of the film than any of the other artists presently working on the various Star Wars comic titles.
1/04/2016
1/02/2016
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