North and South (Avatar: The Last Airbender Comics #5)
By Gene Luen Yang, Gurihuru (illustrator)
Publication Year: 2016
Type: Fiction
Genre: graphic novel, fantasy
Read on 2019-10-13
View additional specs on this book in Muhan’s 2019 Reading Survey ➞
★★★★★
JUST SO FUCKING GOOD IN EVERY WAY I’M SO FUCKIN SHOOKK MAN. Like there’s beautiful art, so wonderful and charming and concise and smartly designed panels for maximal fun storytelling and pay-off. PURE MASTERY in storytelling through text and image, makes concepts of colonialism, industrialisation, sovereignty, geopolitics, and cultural heritage somehow SUPER accessible for kids - you really don’t need to know about the history of Inuit culture and land sovereignty or modern day Inuit life/Arctic sovereignty/resource extraction politics to have a swell time reading BUT OH MY GOD IF YOU DO YOU CAN REALLY APPRECIATE HOW WELL AND HOW NUANCED GENE LUEN YANG & CO. HAVE GOT IT. The stories and worlds are also so fresh and original that even if it alludes to real life stuff it’s never heavy handed, there’s always lots of new worldbuilding detail and truly wonderful fantastical bits to make it fresh. Really faithful also to the ethos of the show and the core of the characters, does a great job capturing the goofy kid humor and dynamics in the show. I’ve never read any of the other ATLA comics because I wasn’t ever fully convinced they were canon, but I started reading this because I saw my little brother had borrowed it on our shared Libby app/library account, and I’m so glad I did. I’m hooked and now I’m not only gonna read the others, I’m also finally gonna check out Gene Luen Yang’s other stuff!!! MacArthur Genius indeed!!!
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