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| Library Copy |
It's been long enough since I've written about a graphic novel, and that's not because I haven't been reading them - I absolutely have. It's just challenging to write reviews for individual TP's, so I avoid doing it. But when a graphic novel is a stand-alone thing, that makes my job easier.
Jillian Tamaki is probably best known as the illustrator of the now mandatory Summer Reading assignment for some very lucky middle-school kids - This One Summer. I'd remarked in that review of how jealous I was of her ability to draw such fluid characters and stunning landscapes. SuperMutant Magic Academy was a web-comic Tamaki made, and I have to say I kind of enjoyed seeing her art improve over the course of the series.
Each comic is brief but snarky, dark, and bitingly honest. You get a good idea of Tamaki's sense of humor, but it's a good description of the modern teen & young adult. Sure, it's set in a high-school almost Hogwarts-esque or like Professor Xavier's School for Gifted Youngsters, but there's no acknowledgement that this school is especially special or woo-woo or anything like that. The students are all still teen-aged dirt-bags, and that's kinda refreshing.
I enjoyed this collection of comics, having read a few online over the years but never kept up with the web series as a whole, it's nice to be given the chance to read them all at once like this. It's also really refreshing to see talented illustrators I know from a web presence break into the publishing industry. (I mean, publishers would really have to be foolish to completely ignore that amount of popularity. That's what we like to call "leaving money on the table.") Now, what comic book will I read next time I'm waiting for my friends to meet me for coffee on Sunday mornings?
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