Avatar: The Last Airbender / Star Wars: The Clone Wars

This is one of 2011's crop of Free Comic Book Day giveaways.

Title: Avatar: The Last Airbender / Star Wars: The Clone Wars
Date: May, 2011
Publisher: Dark Horse Comics
Writer: Ryder Windham, J. Torres
Artist: Ben Dewey, Gurihiru
Inker: Dan Parsons
Letterer: Michael Heisler, Comicraft
Colorist: Mae Hao
Editor: Samantha Robertson, Dave Roman
Cover: Brian Konietzko, Hye Jung Kim, Bryan Evans, Lucasfilm

Wait for it... Flip book!

The bad news first. The Star Wars: The Clone Wars story serves to introduce Savage Opress, a new villain (You can tell he's a villain by his name! Isn't that clever? Also by the fact that he looks like a yellow version of Darth Maul). Opress shows up at the lair of Noggox the Hutt. He has been captured without a fight by Noggox's (clearly incompentent) guards. It's all just a plot so he can get inside and kill everyone in sight. This actually pretty violent considering that the introduction proudly proclaims that comic to be suitable for all ages. I guess decapitations are okay if the victim is a hutt. Anyway, that's about all we get. The heroes make a brief appearance at the end to survey the carnage. I'm not entirely sure what the point of that was, but as far as I was concerned, Opress definitely failed to impress.

Flipping the book over, we have Avatar: The Last Airbender. This was my first exposure to this series, and wow. This was good storytelling. It did take a little bit to hook me in, but considering that the beginning of the story was pretty light in tone, it really built to a pretty intense ending. I thought that Avatar worked better when it was being serious than when it was trying to be a comedy, but the comedic stuff was still at least as good as most of the comic relief you see in comic books these days. This was an effective introductory story that had a complete plot. There was also a four-page backup story that was all comedy, but gave a chance to introduce another character. The art is a good mix of cartoony and realistic and the characters are very expressive. The action in this one really did seem all-ages suitable. If I was rating this story alone it would probably get an 8.5. Instead, the opposite side of the flip book drags that whole thing down a bit.

Rating: 7/10