Juvenile Fiction/Graphic Novel: Rise of the Robot Army, Robert Venditti & Dusty Higgins

Rise of the Robot Army (Book 2 in the Miles Taylor and the Golden Cape series)

Robert Venditti, illustrated by Dusty Higgins 

ISBN: 9781481405577

Miles gets addicted to the power of the cape and the kick of doing good, and gets kidnapped by a crazy guy with a robot army.

These are fun because they're set in Atlanta, they're prose novels for the most part, but switch into graphic novel format when the character of the Golden Cape is active, and because the author is trying very hard to purposefully subvert the tropes of a superhero narrative and show how hard it is for a normal person to always do what's right and what's best, when they're just normal people faced with powerful temptations.

Supporting Cast: A+. Miles' dad, poor guy. I just want to buy him a drink. At least he's got a girlfriend now. Doctor is cool but needs a bit more characterization. New girl is hella interesting and I hope she's permanent and not treated poorly by the author.  

Plot: A.  Emotional arc is dead-on and perfect for the age-group (honestly, it's perfect for most people all their lives, when you really look at it) and the physical plot/perilous situation is 1) creepy as heck, 2) very nicely built on the first book, 3) subverts superhero-story tropes where people have obvious names to show they're bad-guys or good-guys without actually making the storyline ANY LESS CREEPY (well-done, that is), and 4) is solved relatively rationally and by the characters making informed and purposeful choices instead of getting deus-ex-machina'd (although I do think perhaps dad had a bit of a mild ret-con to his character so that Miles doesn't get murdered at the end of the book).

Fun, silly, engaging, thoughtful, and peopled with fun and interesting characters that are tropey without being any less interesting and individual. I'm really impressed, and really enjoying this series. 

Graphic Novel Book Club: The Surrogates, Robert Venditti & Brett Weldele

Our penultimate title for the year-long graphic novel book club experiment actually got turned into a movie with Bruce Willis!  (The movie wasn't very good, unfortunately.)

The Surrogates
Robert Venditti
art by Brett Weldele
ISBN: 9781891830877
Read July 10, 2016

Think Blade Runner, but everyone (well, pretty much everyone) WANTS to be artificial.  Shades of Ready Player One in there also.  Robotics and cosmetics industries have advanced to the point that "surrogates:" (remotely-controlled real-life robotic avatars of a particular person) are more commonly seen than actual flesh-and-blood people, who are all at home, connected to their computers to run the surrogate's actions in real-time.  Surrogates are faster, stronger, prettier, and allow people to be free from worries of actual physical damage to their real human bodies (except for getting fat as shit, getting deep-vein thrombosis, or getting bedsores from sitting in one place all day, none of which is referenced at all.)  Things are great until some mysterious freak starts frying surrogates, and suspicion falls on a modern-day prophet figure who is rabidly anti-surrogate, and has amassed a religious army in a recently-allocated reservation under his own local rule, where surrogates are not allowed.

Interesting questions of social consciousness, of abdicating personal responsibility, and of the line between helping people who need assistance (surrogates were initially medical devices intended for medically "locked-in" people) and making shitloads of money on luxuries that quickly become common or standard.

I would have liked to see a lot more depth in the world building - I think there were some ideas and concepts that weren't very well meshed up with human psychology and the reality of life in the world, but it was also an interesting, if slightly dark and depressing, mystery thriller.

Graphic Novel: The Homeland Directive, Robert Venditti & Mike Huddleston

The Homeland Directive
author Robert Venditti
artist Mike Huddleston
ISBN: 9781603090247
Multiple styles of illustration are all flawlessly executed in a spy-thriller story with serviceable fill-in-the-numbers characters.
Graphic Novel Club book for August

I really like Venditti's writing, and this single-arc story was great fun.  Paired with Huddleston's impresario showcase of art styles, it was a delight to read and to browse through afterwards.  The basic premise is pretty simple, and familiar to anyone who has ever watched a Jason Bourne or Mission Impossible movie: an insider from government complex has some nasty ideas, and a plucky gang of archtypes are gathered to oppose the insidious plan.

I really can't talk about the story without ruining it, and it really is a fun story to experience, so I'm limited to gushing about the artwork, and praising the effortless easy pacing and energy that kept everything to a snappy tempo all the way to the very last page.  

Check it out - it's well worth the time, and a nice little filmic stand-alone spy story.

Juvenile Fiction/Graphic Novel: Miles Taylor and the Golden Cape: Attack of the Alien Horde, Robert Venditti & Rusty Higgins

Miles Taylor and the Golden Cape: Attack of the Alien Horde
Robert Venditti, illustrated by Rusty Higgins
ISBN: 9781481405423
Interesting format choice: a prose novel when Miles is himself, and a graphic novel when he's posing as a superhero.
Read June 2015

I'm a little grumpy about the unweildy title (especially when the language and names inside are so clever and punny), but that's literally the only thing wrong with this fun foray into superherohood.  Miles has moved to Atlanta with his dad after his mom divorces them, and he's trying to be a good kid and to keep from getting beaten up too badly at school.  That is until the day the Atlanta superhero Gilded falls to his death inches from Miles, during a brutal battle with a nasty alien monster.  Gilded bequeaths the cape to Miles, reveals himself as an ancient old man, and expires.  Now MILES is the Hero of Atlanta, and he's got to learn on the job, because natural disasters, accidents, and of course impending alien invasion aren't going to wait for him to get a training montage.

The shift between Miles' prose life as himself and the graphic punch of his experiences wearing the cape is beautiful, and a great choice for this story.  I love the contrast, and the ability of that simple format shift to make everything more impactful and immediate.

Love this start, and can't wait for the next one to show up!