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.

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The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen 1 by Alan Moore and Kevin O’Neill: B-

From the front flap:
London, 1898. The Victorian Era draws to a close and the twentieth century approaches. It is a time of great change and an age of stagnation, a period of chaste order and ignoble chaos. It is an era in need of champions.

Allan Quatermain, Captain Nemo, Hawley Griffin, Dr. Henry Jekyll, Mr. Edward Hyde, and Mina Murray are those champions and together they comprise the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen.

Recruited by the enigmatic Campion Bond, under orders from the mysterious “M,” these six adventurers are pressed into service by their empire in its time of need. Now they must face the nefarious Doctor and his vile plan for world domination. But things are not entirely as they seem; other factors, cryptic and corpuscular, are also at play. A remarkable drama ensues.
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League of Extraordinary Gentlemen (Vol 1) (Alan Moore)


The Plot
Miss Mina Murray has been tasked by the mysterious M to collect a group of the world’s most famous ‘heroes’ to work on behalf of him (and perhaps the British government) in reclaiming the stolen wonder-item cavorite. But said ‘heroes’ are reluctant to join in or cooperate with anyone and things do not go as smoothly as they might.

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J’s Take on The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen Vol. 1


The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen by Alan Moore and Kevin O’Neill and some other people has a really good premise. England? In the 1800s? Well-known fictional characters forming a band of super-agents for the British government? What’s not to like?

Unfortunately, the execution leaves much, much, much, MUCH to be desired. I recall being intrigued by the movie, and liking it fairly well. Though it did have problems, even if I can’t now necessarily put my finger on the problems. Well, the comic/graphic novel has a lot of problems.

Plot: Wilhelmina Murray (whoever she is) takes on the mission of assembling a team. First she tracks down Quartermain (whoever he is.. I gather some sort of long-lived, possibly immortal, dead? adventurer dude) and together with Captain Nemo, they get Dr. Jekyll and the Invisible Man. Then they set out to find some substance called ‘cavorite’ that’s some anti-gravity substance. And if they don’t retrieve it, the evil Chinese will take over the world. Or something.
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J’s Take on Adrian Tomine’s Shortcomings

I have to say the cover of this graphic novel really does nothing for me. The color is a drab sort of olive brown, black, and white. And the artwork makes it look like an adult manga. Not that there’s anything wrong with adult manga in general, but I do prefer manga that’s aimed more […]

I have to say the cover of this graphic novel really does nothing for me. The color is a drab sort of olive brown, black, and white. And the artwork makes it look like an adult manga. Not that there’s anything wrong with adult manga in general, but I do prefer manga that’s aimed more for a younger crowd. So just looking at the cover, it looks like a book that’ll bore me.

I didn’t really remember what this graphic novel was supposed to be about before I started reading it, so I was pretty much going in blind. K had warned me I should read the short little bios on the title page before I started reading. Which is good, because I’m about 50% likely to skip those. They’re usually irrelevant, useless data, or contain spoilers.

The bios do give you a hint as to the story, as well as clue you in as to who’s who. Most of the characters were born in the US, a large majority are Asian, and the names make them not uniformly Japanese. What a weird manga! :) Though it does become clear that this isn’t really a manga. The author is Asian American, as are most of the characters, and really, the art style is rather a mix of Japanese and American as well.

At first, I thought the story was really heavy on the Asian American experience thing. It sounded like the characters were preaching about it and going on and on about it. It didn’t even sound like natural dialogue to me, and I was pondering the review I’d write would include a rant on comics that just don’t get the concept of realistic dialogue. But then I read further into the story, and parts of it and some of the characters started to amuse me.

It’s still heavily about Asian American experiences, prejudices, and problems, but I came to realize that that was pretty much the point of the story. And a source of real angst for the main character. He has hangups. His largest one being that he fantasizes about white women and has trouble admitting that that’s his preference. Other characters tell him to just accept it, but it’s in conflict with the idea that American culture has indoctrinated him into believing white women to be superior and sexier.

He is, by the way, a total jerk. I don’t know why the smart and funny lesbian chick has him as a best friend. He even sucks as a beard, being Japanese in ancestry to her family’s Korean!

The story was nice to read in a ‘this is different from what I usually read’ sort of way, and you don’t hear nearly enough about Asian Americans in mainstream media, especially from the inside out. And I did find parts of it amusing, and I did rather like the lesbian character. But I didn’t like the main character at all, and I’m rather glad it was relatively short. It made its point, and then it stopped.

So, good story, and maybe I’ll read more by Adrian Tomine. I just hope he doesn’t have more books about this character. I’m not reading those.

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