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ballisticbaylor 's review for:
Imbalance
by Bryan Konietzko, Michael Dante DiMartino, Faith Erin Hicks
The OG Team Avatar (no Zuko) is back in print by a new creative team! I was nervous about introducing a new team to take the helm of this series, but I’m quite pleased with their first entry! Faith Erin Hicks easily brought these characters to life and created another geopolitical conflict that is relevant to the problems in our own world. She is doing the delicate work of someone working in a vastly developed universe’s IP by beginning to concretely build a narrative bridge between Last Airbender and Legend of Korra. Peter Wartman’s art can be a little underwhelming at times, but he gets the most important thing right: the lively expressions of the characters. Even if the backgrounds practically ceased to exist in some 40-50% panels, the characters carried the narrative forward.
Decades before Amon led a anti-bending revolution in Republic City, another villain led a anti-non-bending revolution in the bones of that future city. This bender supremacy is fascinating in its own right, but it’s clear that it’s a thinly veiled metaphor for white supremacy. Bending as power finds its (not perfect) parallel in whiteness as privilege. The powerful are threatened by the oppressed, who in one character’s words “aren’t trying to take anything away from us. They’re just trying to live their lives.” And yet these bigoted benders act in fear by protesting “you won’t replace us!” and tout about “natural order.” So yeah, you’re run of the mill racists. And just like the previous volume, the conflict is not fully resolved in the end because it’s quite hard to snuff out this kind of ego-centric, fear-driven power tripping. This imbalance (yin) will lead to a opposite imbalance (yang) in the future. And so world always has the need for bridge builders like the Avatar.
Bravo! This is another success in a fantastic series.
Decades before Amon led a anti-bending revolution in Republic City, another villain led a anti-non-bending revolution in the bones of that future city. This bender supremacy is fascinating in its own right, but it’s clear that it’s a thinly veiled metaphor for white supremacy. Bending as power finds its (not perfect) parallel in whiteness as privilege. The powerful are threatened by the oppressed, who in one character’s words “aren’t trying to take anything away from us. They’re just trying to live their lives.” And yet these bigoted benders act in fear by protesting “you won’t replace us!” and tout about “natural order.” So yeah, you’re run of the mill racists. And just like the previous volume, the conflict is not fully resolved in the end because it’s quite hard to snuff out this kind of ego-centric, fear-driven power tripping. This imbalance (yin) will lead to a opposite imbalance (yang) in the future. And so world always has the need for bridge builders like the Avatar.
Bravo! This is another success in a fantastic series.