Scan barcode
A review by thekarpuk
Attack on Titan Anthology by Gail Simone, Scott Snyder, Jeanine Schaefer
2.0
This book should have been easy to like. A lot of the art is amazing, and there's a good chunk of the creators whose work I already read.
But damn if the misses don't outweigh the hits.
From what I can see, there's only really two ways you can go if someone asks you to write something related to Attack on Titan. You can either lean into the intense, tragic nature of the source material, or you can poke fun at the premise. The stories that worked best tended to go with the former. There's a few stories, many of them with amazing art, that really capture the sadness that makes the original manga so powerful.
But it annoyed me that most of the stories by creators I'm already a fan of were mostly irrelevant spoofs. Faith Erin Hicks story about making Titans laugh with dumb jokes just made me sigh, the comic by the team from Batgirl of Burnside did a dumb comic that doubled as a message about cosplay and consent (I liked the message more than the story), and beyond that there was an ongoing mini comic full of the sort of dumb jokes you'd expect on a deep otaku fan webcomic.
When this collection works, it works well, but that's not nearly often enough to satisfy.
But damn if the misses don't outweigh the hits.
From what I can see, there's only really two ways you can go if someone asks you to write something related to Attack on Titan. You can either lean into the intense, tragic nature of the source material, or you can poke fun at the premise. The stories that worked best tended to go with the former. There's a few stories, many of them with amazing art, that really capture the sadness that makes the original manga so powerful.
But it annoyed me that most of the stories by creators I'm already a fan of were mostly irrelevant spoofs. Faith Erin Hicks story about making Titans laugh with dumb jokes just made me sigh, the comic by the team from Batgirl of Burnside did a dumb comic that doubled as a message about cosplay and consent (I liked the message more than the story), and beyond that there was an ongoing mini comic full of the sort of dumb jokes you'd expect on a deep otaku fan webcomic.
When this collection works, it works well, but that's not nearly often enough to satisfy.