k – Page 8 – Triple Take

Zita the Spacegirl (Ben Hatke)

The Plot
Zita and her friend Joseph are on their way home from school when a meteor crashes nearby. Upon finding a mysterious red button concealed within the meteorite, Zita naturally wants to press it — and press it she does. After this results in Joseph being kidnapped by aliens, Zita finds her courage and goes after him, knowing that she may be his only chance of getting home again.

My Thoughts
First impressions are key, they say, and this graphic novel makes a marvelous first impression. The book is in full, vibrant color and composed of sturdy, thick paper pages which not only don’t bleed through, but which look and feel like they’ll stand up very well to small hands and repeated readings.

Zita manages to live up to the great first impression. The artwork, a pleasing mixture of cute and weird, manages somehow to present a detailed and exciting setting while still remaining simple enough that the panels never feel cluttered and the characters overpowered by the backgrounds. As the story got underway, part of me couldn’t help trying to picture how the graphic novel would translate to a movie — and if said movie should be animated by Studio Ghibli or done in live action by the Jim Henson Company. (Sorry, Disney-Pixar, I don’t think you could handle it.)

The story itself is straightforward: girl in a strange land collects a group of rag-tag misfits and heads off to ~~find the wizard~~ ~~summon one of the four gods~~ rescue her friend, but it’s very well-done and effectively told through the artwork and dialogue. I was hooked from the beginning, when Zita and her friend Joseph encounter the meteorite (called a meteoroid in the text, which I’m pretty sure is only what they’re called when they’re still in space) and the mysterious red button. Joseph’s abrupt abduction leads to easily the most realistic reaction I’ve seen in a long time: Zita panics and runs away. But she masters her fears and comes back again, making her effort to rescue him clearly much more considered (and brave!) than a story in which she impulsively and recklessly leapt through the portal right away.

I really had only one major problem with this work. It didn’t affect my enjoyment of it, but it’s not a minor concern, either. It is this: after I finished the book, I sat back with a feeling of vague confusion. I could not remember a single identifiably female character other than Zita — not just among the named characters, but even as scenery in the background*. Then I wondered why I remembered all of the other named characters as male. Some of them were robots, and surely they weren’t assigned a gender? So I went back through the book again, and as it turns out, my impression was unfortunately correct. Not only is Zita the only identifiably female character in the book, every other named character (with the exception of Strong-strong) is referred to with a male pronoun.

I was shocked by this. Was this an oversight on the author’s part, or a conscious decision? Either way, it doesn’t look good. The default gender in the universe should not be ‘male’. Unfortunately, this is pretty common in properties which are aimed toward a cross-gender or male market — but that doesn’t make it okay, less offensive, or less obvious to girls that they’re being dissed. (I was one of those girls, and marketing people can say all they like about girls being willing to watch/read/enjoy things with boy characters — it may be true but we NOTICE.)

The book is good, and I’d like to see more. I can’t give author Ben Hatke a ‘bye’ for this, but I can hope he will strive to provide a more gender diverse cast in any future Zita installments.

*Toward the end, there appears to be an extremely random cameo by Marzipan, but I don’t know if I want to count that.

In Short
Zita the Spacegirl is fantastic. As a character, Zita is believable, interesting and charismatic. The artwork supports the story perfectly, and makes it feel like a movie even while remaining still on the page. I’ll certainly be purchasing a copy of my own, and I’ll probably be recommending that the library purchase it as well. The one major flaw in this work is an egregious gender imbalance, with Zita being the only female character I was able to identify in the entire book — I’m hopeful this is something the author will correct in future installments.

A review copy of Zita the Spacegirl was provided by the publisher.

The Key to the Kingdom 1-4 (Kyoko Shitou)

The Plot
After the King of Landor and his eldest son are killed in battle, the people of Landor (at least the upper class people) are soon embroiled in a contest to see who will succeed to the throne. Five candidates of royal blood begin a quest for the mysterious artifact known only as the “Key to the Kingdom”. Whoever can acquire it within the allotted time frame will win the kingdom.

My Thoughts
After the death of his father and his brother, Prince Astarion, the next heir to the throne, refuses to take over or to allow a regency to be established in his name (he’s 12 or 13 as the story opens.) Rather than settle immediately upon another claimant and possibly spark a civil war, the King’s council wisely decides to organize a sort of contest: all eligible parties (aka those with some sort of blood claim to the throne, however distant) may undertake a quest for the artifact known as the “Key to the Kingdom”. Anyone who finds it within two years will win the kingdom. If no one finds it within the time frame, then the throne will revert to Prince Astarion whether he likes it or not.

Asta finds himself among the candidates, however reluctantly, and he sets off with his brother’s friend Baddorius to see if he can figure out just what this mysterious item actually is. The reader follows their progress, with intermittant updates on Letty (the only female candidate, and Asta’s friend/crush) and later Asloan Fairheart, candidate number 5.

With all of these characters and quite a few mysteries set up, I admit to feeling some concern: this is, after all, only a six volume series, and while 1000-ish pages is quite a decent length for a plain old prose trilogy, it’s actually not a whole lot of manga real estate in which to tell a complex story.

But we get right into the thick of things: the first couple of volumes serve very well to introduce the main characters and the present situation. And once the reader has a handle on the basic setting, the author wastes no time in delving into the history of the kingdoms and revealing quite a bit more about what’s actually going on.

It becomes clear very early on that the day of the summer solstice is going to be key, and the various players spend a span of several months getting into place for what will happen on that date. Volume four comes to a close as that day is dawning, leaving the reader to anticipate what’s going to happen next.

Thus far, the series has impressed me with its pacing. Not only has mangaka Kyoko Shitou resisted the temptation to overly complicate her plot, she’s also doling out important information a little bit at a time, rather than trying to keep it all until the end. I really feel like there’s enough time left for the major points to be resolved, and resolved well.

The characterization has also been good — in fact, I like Asta a lot more than I thought I was going to at the start, and I’ve been extremely pleased by the lack of stupidity shown by quite a lot of the characters. For the most part they seem like alert people who aren’t likely to fall prey to annoying plots like not passing on a vital bit of information for no good reason, or drawing entirely the wrong conclusion about something and acting a fool as a result.

Hopefully the final two volumes will continue these positive trends and bring us to a satisfactory conclusion of the story.

In Short
Mangaka Kyoko Shitou has created an imaginitive pseudo-medieval setting for her fantasy manga The Key to the Kingdom. The first two-thirds of the series is spent setting up the principle players and maneuvering them into place for the climax to come in the final two volumes. It does its job: enough is revealed to the reader to make one interested in the fates of the characters and the ultimate answers to the mysteries not yet solved.

The Man Who Loved Books Too Much (Allison Hoover Bartlett)

The Plot
Over a period of years, John Gilkey targeted rare book dealers, using a combination of schemes to fraudulently acquire valuable books. Though he was caught many times, he always returned to his predations. Ken Sanders, a book dealer who was also security chair of the Antiquarian Booksellers’ Association of America, was determined to stop him.

Continue reading “The Man Who Loved Books Too Much (Allison Hoover Bartlett)”

Alan Turing: an enigma (Andrew Hodges)

The Plot
As a child, Alan Turing gave little indication that he was likely to amount to anything. But as a young man at Cambridge, he soon revealed his mathematical abilities and his original way of envisioning problems. During World War 2 he contributed in a highly significant way to the British and American efforts to break the encrypted German military communications. And after World War 2 his vision of computers — and computer programs — proved incredibly prescient.

Continue reading “Alan Turing: an enigma (Andrew Hodges)”

Warriors of Alavna (N.M. Browne)

The Plot
Dan and Ursula are two British teenagers on a school field trip. A strange fog envelops them and the two find themselves transported to a strange new world where there are still Romans and Celtic tribesmen. Once there, they’re thrown into a deadly conflict for which neither is prepared, but with which they must deal if they’re ever to have a chance of finding a way home.

My Thoughts
Somehow, even though I’m the one in charge of creating the “Upcoming” page on Tripletake, I had not actually read the blurb I pasted in for this book. The result being that my impressions of the book, formed from only its title, were completely wrong. It was nothing like what I expected (which was, of course, relatively high fantasy centering around a land called Alavna).

We begin instead in Hastings (as in Battle of) where Ursula and Dan, unwilling partners on a school field trip, have found themselves in the middle of a clinging yellow mist. Dan is a smart, athletic, popular kid while Ursula is apparently an outcast who has low self-esteem due to her height (tall) and build (heavy). These facts turn out to be rather less important than one might expect in a young adult novel. The point of view shifts between Ursula and Dan throughout the whole book, but it’s most noticeable here at the beginning, where we’re most in their heads. Dan’s point of view is presented in short, nearly clauseless sentences, while Ursula’s sentence structure is more complex. It was an interesting contrast but for me, it made reading Dan’s sections difficult. It felt like the equivalent of being in heavy traffic — you’d move for a couple seconds and then jerk to a stop again. Repeat.

Ursula and Dan emerge from the mist into somewhere different — a land which might be Britain of the distant past or might not. In any case, the situation there is much the same as the situation in Britain during the middle of the Roman occupation. The Celtic tribes are finding their way of life threatened, their lands taken, their authority usurped; in desperation, they’ve been trying to use magic to lift the Veil and summon help from elsewhere. What they got was Ursula and Dan, who don’t feel especially useful.

Of course, the reader knows this will turn out not to be the case: they will obviously hold the key to solving the tribes’ problems, at least in the short term. It wouldn’t be much of a story, otherwise. Dan’s ‘talent’ is revealed fairly early on in the story: he’s what the tribes call a ‘bear sark’, aka a berserker in the grandest tradition of the word. He can turn into an unstoppable killing machine in a disturbingly easy way (disturbing to himself perhaps more than the reader) and go Hitokiri Battousai on all the bad-guys.

Ursula’s purpose is developed more slowly, and it’s she more than Dan who ends up as the central figure of the book. The Celts who summon her and Dan mistake her initially for a boy and this ruse is continued for a very large part of the book. Though it strains credulity for portions of the beginning, it’s a necessary ploy to keep her involved with the male warriors who making the decisions for the tribes. While there’s some lip service paid to the idea that the Celts were a relatively equal society whose womenfolk are known to fight alongside the men, we never see this in practice and the men all seem content enough with the patriarchy, new or not.

The plotting is well-paced; there are no sections of the book where there are too many incidents and others where there are too few. The final battle in particular was impressive, conveying as it did the hectic confusion of what an actual battle of the sort might have been like.

Overall, I’m left wondering why I don’t find myself more enthusiastic about the book or more interested in reading the rest of the trilogy. The lack of good female characters may be one reason; there are only two in the book of any note: one a bitchy screwup and one, Ursula, who spends her time disguised as a boy. Maybe it’s because I didn’t really start to feel a connection to the characters until the very end, right when it was clear that everything was about to change again — the next book may be a continuation, but it probably won’t be a continuation of this particular set of circumstances. I don’t know. All I can say is that it didn’t excite me, but I don’t entirely rule out finishing the series.

In Short
In the end, I have mixed feelings about this book. Browne is a good writer, and yet there are other good writers whose stuff I just don’t enjoy. The story itself was pretty solid, but at the end of it I felt like I still had a pretty shallow feel for the two main characters, Ursula and Dan. I was told that they had changed and grown, but since the book started and stopped without any real look at them in the ‘real world’ I have no particular evidence of them either before or after these incidents. There was a distinct lack of female characters, and our one lead female spends almost the entire book pretending to be a boy; the only other prominent female is jealous, impulsive and behaves like a fool. For that alone I should dislike it, but knowing it’s part of a trilogy leaves me with the hope that like many series, it’s much better when taken as a whole.