Review: Avatar: The Last Airbender: The Rift by Gene Luen Yang and Gurihiru

My reviews of Series Four of the Fourth Doctor Adventures come to an end over at Unreality SF with Jonathan Morris's The Cloisters of Terror, and I go off on a bit of a tangent about the writers lineup.

Comic hardcover, 238 pages
Published 2015 (contents: 2014)
Borrowed from my wife
Read May 2015

Avatar: The Last Airbender: The Rift

Script: Gene Luen Yang

Art: Gurihiru
Lettering: Michael Heisler

Like the first Avatar graphic novel, The Promise, The Rift deals with weighty stuff but still somehow feels light. Yang does a good job of capturing the characters' voices, but doesn't always peg their essences, I think. Part of the problem is that these stories meander a little bit too much (aside from The Search), diluting their potential emotional heft. I feel like the television story could have done this in 25 minutes, and yet The Rift is 238 pages long. It's not terrible by any means, but it's hard to shake the feeling that it ought to be better than it is. Still, time spent with these characters is always well spent, and I look forward to spending more of it with them in future volumes.