Creators: Various
Editor: Kazu Kibuishi
Publisher: Ballantine Books
This is going to be a hard review to justify.
The truth of the matter is that Flight deserves endless praise for what it is, how good it is and what it accomplishes. Beginning publication under Image, the first two volumes, featuring various short stories by writer/artists popular and unknown, immediately found a comfortable place among comic award nominations. This has likely been primarily due to editor Kibuishi’s six sense for locating talent and inspiring them to produce the most beautiful, charming and imaginative stories to be bound in one slick collection, produced thus far at a yearly rate, more or less. Success led Flight to major book publisher Ballantine, under which volume three has already seen a major sales increase over previous volumes. Not only should everyone involved be high-fiving each other nonstop for the next month, but the industry as a whole should congratulate Flight’s mastery of exploring and celebrating the comic book medium.
And yet . . . volume three is a tad less satisfying than volume two, which came very close to perfection. The blame doesn’t lie on the collection itself as it does on the inconsistent quality of certain stories within. Don’t worry, three quarters of them range from good to excellent, but a few cause me to question their inclusion among the creative elite.
So who are the elite? Look no further than the creator of entry number one, Michael Gagné. Like his opener to Flight’s second volume, his entry this time, “Underworld”, follows the adventures of a small fox on an alien world and is in turns adventurous, heroic, tragic and wonderfully surprising. His art perfectly captures a vision of whimsy and wonder and in twenty-eight wordless pages he puts the reader through a gamut of emotion. This is what comics are about, folks.
“Snow Cap” by Matthew Armstrong is another wordless wonder of only six pages which depicts a strange situation – a leg-biting monster attaches itself to a girl’s leg. The conclusion on page six makes clever use of this oddball situation for a purposeless-yet-charming punchline.
Another mind-blower is Alex Fuentes’ “One Little March for a Hungry Swarm”. The narrative is led by the lush art and its brilliant designs, such as its laws of motherhood and the “caterkillars”. Its internal logic is captivating, immersive and ultimately haunting.
“Ad Astra” by Chuck BB is another silent six-pager, but it’s a wonderful expression of how a cat lives out its nine lives, and it’s one of the truest fantasies I’ve ever seen.
“The Cloud” is an inventive creation by Bill Plympton about a renegade cloud that wants to impress the world. It may be the entry that relies most on the accompanying text and the one for which the text is also the strongest.
The entry that made the biggest impact on me was “Voodoo” by Matthew Forsythe. His is the only story in the volume – perhaps in the entire series – that uses another language to tell the story; in this case, it’s Korean. Those that don’t know the language can follow the story just as easily through the visuals, but having a basic grasp of Korean, I can assert that its inclusion does add something.
Now, it doesn’t please me to point out the weaker entries in this volume, but I have to give a fair explanation of why they bring down the collection as a whole.
“The Brave Sea” by Steve Hamaker really shouldn’t be included. The story, about a sea lion who stumbles into shark-infested waters, is mundane both in terms of the setting and the animals used, and the story’s conclusion was as predictable when Aesop wrote it. More than that, the dialogue is clunky and the art, while vivid in color, isn’t really very sharp in terms of design. It just doesn’t live up to the high standard of the series.
Maybe it’s just me, but I just don’t get Neil Babra’s “In Due Time”. To be honest, I’ve found each of his stories – which have appeared in every Flight volume so far – to be rather weak, included perhaps because of their unique ethnic background. They simply don’t jive with the feeling I get from the other Flight stories.
Bannister’s “So Far, So Close” is certainly pretty, but the situation of a guy trying to keep eye contact with a pretty girl he sees on the bus is just far too simple. I think the concept has potential, but the storytelling falls below its demands.
The seventeen other stories I haven’t mentioned are generally rather good, such as “Jellaby: The Tea Party” and “The Edge” by Ben Hatke, but quite a few a very forgettable and don’t leave as deep a mark as the stronger entries, which were more prevalent in the previous volume. Still, a new reader who’s never sampled Flight will likely be overwhelmed by the samples of quality within this volume and will doubtless become a believer of Kibuishi’s masterful anthology. Though the stories occasionally tread over serious themes, Flight is the kind of book a parent can – and should – read and enjoy along with their children.
What did you think of this book?
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