Rating: WARTY!
Written by Gnone, with art by Barbucci and Canepa, this series is about a group of girls who find out they're the guardians of the tediously trope elements of Air, Earth, Energy, Fire, and Water. Had I realized this was a Disney series and that the creators had been denied ownership by the Disney Dictatorship, I would never have picked it up. As it goes, I was pleased that I had paid nowhere near full price for this. This volume was misleading, because although it says Volume 1 on the cover, reading more closely, which like an idiot I did not do, this volume 1 is part two! Then why not call it volume 2? Or episode 2 or something?
Well, it turns out that would breech the comic code whereby you're not allowed to know where the fuck you are in a series if you come into it as an ongoing concern. For some reason publishers are determined to make it as hard as possible to figure out exactly where you should start and in what order you should proceed. Endless rebooting of a series, reinventing it, retconning it, rebooting previously dead characters, endless returns of long-beaten villains, and all that crap are some of the reasons why I'm seriously losing interest graphic novels unless they really are one-off, stand-alone stories.
Nevertheless, this one did look interesting and was on close out, so I figured I had little to lose beyond a couple of bucks. I started in on it hopefully, but now I wish I'd spent the money on ice cream instead! So I was misled by seeing 'Volume 1' and overlooking 'Part 2 of Nerissa's Revenge'. That was my bad, and so this was not the first volume, but somewhere in the series. Despite that it wasn't hard to get into; it's just that it wasn't interesting. Instead of getting into the main story about the magic and all that, this volume wandered off into girlish drama, moodiness, and bitchiness, and it was tedious to read. I can see that crap in real life if I want to. I don't need to read about it in a graphic novel.
I have to add a note here about how disappointed I am with Canepa's art. Not in this book, but I've seen other examples and for a female artist to draw sexualized and exploitative images of young females like she does in some of her work is inexcusable.
But back to this book. I should have guessed with Disney that it would not be anything worth taking seriously, but you live and learn and the more I learn about Disney the less I like about Disney. Obviously this novel isn't aimed at me, but I don't think this kind of thing shoudl be aimed at anyone. It's possible to write a story that, while directed at a certain segment, is interesting enough to appeal to a wider audience, and also plays tot he strengths of the core audience, not to it's weakness, tropes, and clichés.
Authors who don't recognize this, risk becoming a niche item. Not that Disney cares. They can spit authors out and bring in new ones on a whim, and they have the legal power to kill lawsuits brought by those same authors without even losing their stride toward another ten billion dollar year, so why on Earth would they care? This graphic novel sucked.
