Category: Reviews

Nnewts Book Two: The Rise of Herk
By Doug TenNapel
202 pages, Scholastic Graphix, $19.99 (hc)/$10.99 (pb)

I admire Doug TenNapel’s imagination and productivity. A new year and a new book from the cartoonist. This year’s offering is the second instalment in his new Nnewts universe, a follow-up to last year’s Escape from the Lizzarks.

It’s a colorful, imaginative world of varying races and creatures but the basic battle between good and evil remains recognizable to readers. The Nnewts are one of the predominant races and poor Herk was intentionally born with weak legs, all part of some master destiny. He gains magical powers and is called upon to use them to protect Amphibopolis from the threat of the vile Snake Lord.

The story is also about family, the one made from blood and the one made from love. He’s been separated from his brother Zerk, raised by Pikk and his mother but Zerk found by their sister Sissy. When the three meet up late in this second volume, it’s an explosive confrontation.

In the meantime, the Snake Lord is back, but stuck in the form of a radish (don’t ask, Doug’s not explaining) and manipulates events to bring about the Spell of Spells, using the Blakk Mudd to turn everyone in the city into Lizzarks, cementing his rule. Of course, Herk and his newfound magical abilities, stand between him and victory.

The book moves along at TenNapel’s usual frenetic pace, mixing action with comedic bits, and never lingering too long on one set or set of characters. It moves quickly which is probably why his work does so well with the 8-12 year old it’s aimed at.  His visual design, aided by Katherine Garner’s excellent color work, no doubt entices readers. The finale between the bestial Megasloth and the Snake Lord’s avatar is pretty cool.

As with most Graphix series, I feel there need to be recap pages since readers may not recall key details or characters when there’s a year between volumes. TenNapel does fill in the background in the book’s first third so does better than some of his compatriots.

On the other hand, like the other series, there’s a cliffhanger so it’s not a complete story with several threads leaving readers hanging until 2017. For the price, there should be a more complete tale and fewer threads.

Norm of the North is the worst movie I’ve ever seen in a theater. There was not a single aspect of this movie that indicated that any more than the minimum amount of effort was expended by anyone in the production process. It’s a lifeless dud all the way around; the kind of movie that had me wondering if I could get away with walking out after the first half hour and reviewing the delicious burrito I ate for lunch instead. But I endured, and instead I’m here to tell you about this wretched disaster of a movie.

I have no stomach for lazy animation. Norm of the North is some of the worst animation work I’ve ever seen. The character models have a bizarre lack of detail and the textures often feel slapped on. There’s a killer whale character in the first act of the movie that looks like a concept drawing for an Alien xenomorph. The environments are flat including the most lifeless depiction of New York City I’ve seen on film since I Am Legend. There’s no activity in the background unless it is going to directly involve itself with the scene. Everything about the visual language of the film communicates that this is a dead world inhabited by haunting marionettes made by someone who had never seen a person or an animal with their own eyes. I don’t think Pixar, Dreamworks, or Disney would put out animation this bad for an interstitial scene on a mobile app, let alone a feature film, because it would be too embarrassing, I wish Norm of the North felt the same shame.

When my father saw substandard animation he would often say it would be better off as a radio play, and that is absolutely not the case with this film. This movie strains my suspension of disbelief at every turn in a way that a movie about Dracula running a hotel never did. The events and character motivations never feel organic or even like they follow naturally from the scene that preceded it, just like it was picked from whatever goldfish bowl passed for a rewrite here. It’s not clever, it’s not funny, it’s not provocative, and it’s just there because something needs to happen. There’s a hodgepodge of attempted morals that are adopted and dropped as soon as the scene is over it doesn’t even seem particularly committed to the stated goal of protecting the arctic.

I’m almost okay with Norm of the North being a terrible movie— mistakes happen even if they seem to involve two production companies and a major distributor having no idea what a coherent film are— but this isn’t just a bad movie, this wants to be a terrible franchise. The lemmings seem designed to be a spin-off property like the Minions before them (they got almost all of the laughs in my audience) and God forbid we allow those things to happen organically anymore. The “Arctic Shake” dance numbers come out of nowhere and have no service to plot or character, so I can only conclude there’s a nefarious piece of merchandise around the corner or some desire to go viral.

Reading that last sentence I get that I sound a little unhinged, as if I’m suffering from some sort of acute Norm of the North derangement, but that’s where I’m at with this movie. It was bad, worse than normal bad movies, worse than Pixels (the movie I just named the worst of 2015), it’s a movie so horrible that I find it hard to believe it’s a simple failure and instead begin to see it as an elaborate conspiracy to make a movie so insulting to the taste of any reasonable viewer. I would believe this move was the result of a bet between two executives about how bad a movie could be and still make a profit. I would believe this was some kind of Producers-esque scam and has been financed several times its budget only to be a surefire failure. Anything is better than believing this is an honest effort to make a good film, because it’s so heart wrenching to imagine that the gigantic team responsible for an animated movie could fail so spectacularly. It hurts to think of years of collective effort turning out this boring, ugly, nonsense.

Secret Hero Society: Study Hall of Justice
By Derek Fridolfs and Dustin Nguyen
Scholastic, 176 pages, $12.99

DC Comics and other companies with rich libraries, have decided to slice and dice their properties to fit whatever audience they think they can service.  Fidelity to the source material has become increasingly irrelevant so to enjoy most adaptations, you have to accept that, sit back, and enjoy the work for what it is. Such is the case with the latest offering from the team of Derek Fridolfs and Dustin Nguyen, who produced the youth-oriented Batman: Li’l Gotham for DC and are back with the first in a series of YA graphic novels under the Secret Hero Society umbrella.

Study Hall of Justice is set at the Ducard Academy and Bruce Wayne has just been accepted as a new student. Upon arrival, his keen senses already tip him off that things are not what they seem and throughout this book he pieces the clues together although long-time comic readers will figure it out long before.

The school is run by and populated by an all-too familiar cast of characters, heavily taken from the Batman mythos although the gym teacher is Zod and his homeroom teacher is Mr. Grundy. You chuckle at the notion of Vandal Savage as the history teacher or Siobhan McDougal (a.k.a Silver Banshee) as the choir director.

The students are drawn from around the world with Diana from distant Themyscira and Bane from South America although little is made of the international population. Instead there’s Joe Kerr as the class clown and other students are identified as Oswald and Circe. What’s interesting is that despite a blur suspected to be a student, no other hero is among the middle school population, It falls to Bruce, Clark Kent, and Diana to band together, despite all odds, to figure out why they’re being carefully evaluated for a place called Nanda Parbat.

The humor is gentle and the characterization is surface only as Fridolfs and Nguyen hurry us from September through June in 176 pages with asides for schedules, maps, and chat sessions taking up prime real estate. Fridolfs gets the basic right for the varying personalities, sandpapered down to the 8-12 year old readership. Similarly, Nguyen’s pleasing art makes everyone just recognizable enough although sometimes his characters seem drawn for elementary school not middle school.

Frankly, shoving a year into a single volume deprived the creators from a chance for doing anything fresh or unique with the characters. Instead, the archetypal personalities are on display and yes, they don their familiar outfits for the first time as part of a Halloween event although it makes their later adult secret identities superfluous. I wish more time was spent actually developing the characters from main to supporting so was more engaging.

No doubt the target audience will enjoy these but as a gateway to DC’s collected editions or periodicals, it fails since there is nothing between this and those remotely in common.

So there’s this guy, see? Name of Shouta. And he’s obsessed with the female lead character in his favorite manga story, which he re-reads over and over again. (He’s otherwise the usual shonen lead character: first-year in high school, glasses, quiet, no friends or respectable hobbies — the total otaku.) And then, on page two of this story, since we need to get going quickly, she appears in his bedroom, falling out of wherever right on top of him.

Wow, right? That’s Gou-dere Sora Nagihara.

But, of course, she only looks like the Sora Nagihara of the comics, and has a completely different personality. The demure, shy girl dying of Ali-McGraw-in-Love-Story disease of the comics has manifested in Shouta’s real world as a raging sex-obsessed force of nature. Since this is a humor comic, she’s not obsessed with actually having sex herself — that would be too easy — but with making sure Shouta has a lot of sex with random women and thus populates the world with his offspring so he can rule the world. (This last doesn’t make any sense, and probably isn’t supposed to — it’s big and bizarre and funny, probably more so to the Japanese.)

Again, probably because of the Rule of Funny, Sora’s efforts to strip and degrade the young women near Shouta result in Shouta getting arrested, and then immediately released. (Because if there’s a girl running around ripping off other girls’ clothing and spraying them with various thick viscous substances, the thing to do is declare the closest man responsible, right? This series finds new and different ways to fail feminism on nearly every page — it’s quite breathtaking.) Oh, and some of the girls thus harassed are actual characters — like the tough-as-nails head of the dorm where Shouta was living, and the schoolmate who lets him (and Sora) stay with her family when he inevitably gets kicked out of the dorms — who both blame Shouta for Sora’s actions and yet never become entirely hostile to him. Oh, and the other male characters (only two of them, notably) are really weird, over-the-top martial-artist types, grown-ups who are even less connected to what we’d call reality than Sora.

Hmm. Know what we’ve got here? It looks like a harem manga, And a particularly baroque, self-aware one, at that. Shouta is very much the standard nebbish, though Sora is more specifically all about sex in her plot-driving wackiness, but otherwise it follows the pattern very closely — down to the one girl that the hero really loves, even amid all of the crazy sex-comedy going on around them. (Though Gou-Dere is a self-aware harem manga; it lampshades that relationship a good two volumes before it even really pops up as a serious thing.)

Things get more complicated from that beginning, of course, as they must — the whole point of a harem manga is that things get more complicated, until only the most devoted readers can even tell who all of the various girls are and what their individual very specific personality quirks are. (This is probably the point to mention that “gou-dere” is a Japanese manga-girl descriptor which essentially means “fanatically devoted to her master and particularly to obtaining nubile females for him to impregnate.” The title of this series could literally not get more on-the-nose. You know how Inuit languages supposedly have a hundred words for snow? Well, Japanese manga readers have at least that many terms to describe the vast number of commedia dell’arte-esque standard characters that pop up in story after story.) But it’s all harem manga-style stories, and knowingly so — they go to a hot springs, for example, and Sora comments on the genre expectations.

This is culturally specific humor, like a lot of manga — it comes out of a culture where being polite and quiet and  worrying about others is the very most important thing that you have to do every single moment of every single day. And so breaking that norm — as broadly and completely as possible, in the most shocking ways possible — is a source of humor. I personally found Gou-Dere more weird than funny, but I’m not part of that culture. If you are culturally Japanese, or very deeply invested in that culture (as a lot of Westerners are), you’ll probably find this more immediate than I did. But even if this doesn’t hit you the way it’s supposed to, it’s still an intensely weird, self-consciously genre work, and it’s interesting to see that play out, even if the specific genre elements are not as familiar.