Avatar the Last Airbender: The Rift
by Bryan Konietzko, Michael Dante DiMartino, Gene Luen Yang, and Gurihiru
Call # GN JR AVATAR
I LOVE the Avatar series (with the element bending, not James Cameron's stupid blue kitty people), and The Rift is no exception. As the third story arc in the comic series, The Rift
continues to build on Team Avatar's many adventures as well as diving
even deeper into the characters themselves (finally Toph will face her
past!). The writers and artists keep up their fantastic style while
seamlessly integrating new places and people into the unique Avatar
universe.
As
the third story, however, I would have to say you can't really
recommend this book to anyone unless they've read the first two comic
series, The Promise and The Search (as I side note, I did not find The Promise very interesting, so you may want to emphasize that The Search and The Rift get much better). On top of that, there are many
references to the tv series in this book (like I said, Toph will
finally face her past--a past that we see her running away from in
season 2). Readers could potentially get by without having seen the tv
series, but I would recommend they walk over to our DVDs and pick up
Book 1: Water Volume 1 (as another side note, do not, under any circumstances, recommend the M. Night Shymalan's live action The Last Airbender movie--it was beyond terrible).
I
would also recommend this for the older end of our JR crowd (I found it
very interesting that all of the Avatar comics are located in GN JR
since they can deal with some heavy issues and have plenty of violence
in them). Any of our older kids who are interested in magical worlds
(granted, it's not magic, it's bending) and epic adventures tinged with a nice mix of humor would get into this series.
Other read-alikes according to Novelist are: Heroes of Olympus by Robert Venditti, Lullaby by Mike Miller, and Cleopatra in Space by Mike Maihack.
