PopSyndicate.com

Three graphic novels in three different genres with one underwhlemed audience.

I love Camilla D’Errico. She creates paintings with weird and beautiful girls: big eyed and innocent, they are some of the prettiest things fantasy art has to offer. There isn’t a day that goes by where my cell phone wallpaper isn’t some strange and lovely girl of hers. In Burn, she brings us a world where machines and humans are at war. When a genocidal death machine attacks Burn’s village, it slaughters everyone but gets injured itself. In order to survive, it assimilates Burn’s broken body and they merge, becoming one entirely new entity.

But the merge isn’t as easy as it seems. The robot knows only killing, but Burn’s mind and soul is still alive in the new creature, and the two personalities struggle for control. The robot wants to kill humans, who fear and want to kill the hybrid. Burn doesn’t want anyone to die - especially not him. Survival can only come from merging the two halves.

D’Erroco’s art is beautiful as always, though something is lost in black and white. The story, on the other hand, isn’t quite as compelling as the art.

Remember is the tale of a comic artist who can’t catch a break. His stuff is deemed too edgy to be commercial, too full of everything nobody wants to read. Then he meets a girl who not only lives him, she loves his comics. He’s a bit of a jerk, so even though she loves him, he pushes at her and makes her miserable until she can’t take it anymore. The art, infused with blues and greens, is a testament to author\illustrator Benjamin’s talent. Occasionally there is a flash of pink, but the color scheme is monotonous - almost as much as the story. It’s sad; the art makes the lack of deviation beautiful, but the story just doesn’t go anywhere.

Raina is a girl like any other. On the cusp of being a teenager, she is in the band and likes to draw. One night, on the way home from an activity with her friends, she trips and falls, knocking out her two front teeth. This is the opening of Smile, a visit through dentistry, orthodontics, periodontics and every other form of tooth wrangling that will carry Raina into her teenage years and discovery of herself.

The book reads like a guide to the adolescent torture machine that is braces. For a kid going through this process, a sense of camaraderie can be felt with Raina as she goes through procedure after procedure others have gone through, but without that common bond, the graphic novel is without spirit. The art is middling in style and execution; there just isn’t a whole lot that impresses. An interesting note: Smile is the biographical tale of author\illustrator Raina Telgemeier’s own experiences.

Though the books vary wildly in their errors, they have their lackluster finished product in common. Though I do still consider myself a fan of D’Errico’s and eagerly anticipate her next work, the same cannot be said of Benjamin or Telgemeier.

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