Flight, Volume One (2004)

Summary and Review: The Flight anthologies are collections of short comics by young artists, most about 10-20 pages long, and each telling a brief snippet of story (mostly fantasy, but with a wide variety of themes and tones.) Because I've been reading the Flight anthologies out of order - not that there really is an order; only one of the stories is even sort of serialized, but in any case, I read 4, then 3, then 1, then 2 - I was sort of surprised by the earlier volumes.

In the later volumes, the stories are mostly wordless, relying entirely on the visuals to tell the story, but in the early volumes there are words all over the place. I found this kind of disappointing; it took some getting used to, but the wordless stories really show off the artists' skill at conveying story and character and emotion and movement through pictures. With the addition of the words, the stories felt somehow more... regular. Not bad, but not so unique, and the early volumes as a whole didn't have quite the same impact for me. The later volumes really made me sit up and take notice and say to myself, "Wow, that's something incredibly creative that not every writer - or even every comics artist - can do," whereas my reaction to the wordy early volumes was more "Huh, so, it's a bunch of short-form comics."

Volume 1 also had a distinct theme, something I haven't noticed in the previous volumes, in that most of the stories actually have to do with flight of one form or another. My favorites were "I Wish...," by Vera Brosgol, which despite all my earlier bitching was actually fairly wordy but whose topic will I think strike a chord with anyone who ever wished they could fly; "The Bowl," by Clio Chang, which was wordless and somber and will make me think twice about my next visit to a natural history museum; and "Deep Blue" by Phil Craven, which involved penguins and just made me giggle.
3 out of 5 stars.

Recommendation: I think the Flight anthologies will appeal to comics aficionados and newbies both, as a means of sampling a variety of artists and styles, and for the gorgeous production and lovely artwork, as well as the stories. ( )

I love storytelling through graphic art and was fairly excited to dive into this compilation of up-and-coming artists. Like other readers, I found the volume to be a mixed bag. I loved the theme "flight" and enjoyed the creative manner in which some of the artists worked with it. However, I found one nagging problem with most of the stories - lack of narrative development. Of the 24 stories, I felt that two (Jake Parker's "Hugo Earheart" and "The Bowl" by Clio Chiang) stood head and shoulders above the rest, succeeding both in narrative and in art work. There were a few - particularly Jen Wang's "Paper and String;" Jacob Magraw-Mickelson's "Dummy Brother;" and Chris Applehan's untitled - that I really enjoyed for the impressive artwork but not so much the stories. "Taj Majal" by Neil Babra; Enrico Casarosa's "Air and Water;" and Bengal's "Formidable" seem like a works-in-progress and left me wanting more. Catia Chien's two submissions, "Fall" and "Tumbleweed" are beautifully rendered vignettes. I was suprised by how much I liked both "Outside My Window" and "Beneath the Leaves: Jump" by Khang Le and Rad Sechrist, respectively; I give the stories props for being sorta cutesy but still managing to win me over. And I give special mention to Joel Carroll's "Wing" because it reminded me in a good way of the original (dialogue-less) Aeon Flux - before they ruined it with words. That's slightly over half that interested me in one way or another, which is not to say that the others were bad, but they didn't impress me in any sort of way. As a final note, I will add that Scott McCloud's afterword is pretty lame, though I get what he was trying to do - lauding the new generation for their innovative ways of coming together, using new mediums to work with old mediums, gender balance, and diversity. I'm glad I picked it up, but I would probably be hard pressed to peruse subsequent volumes unless one just happened to come my way. I think fans of sequential art will appreciate it more overall than people who don't consider comics legitimate artistry for adults. ( )

Remarkable. A graphic novel in length, but this is really a collage of different stories loosely tied to the theme of flight. The graphic and story styles are all different and all good (and this is just the first volume!). I was particularly impressed by the impact of the stories without any words at all. ( )

FLIGHT, edited by K. Kibuishi, is a collection of short stories told in visual form; several stories are told entirely without words, with varying degrees of success. Overall, this anthology gets my recommendation. The production value, the variety, the storytelling, and clarity, were all very well done.

A sampling of the stories contained in FLIGHT:

"I Wish . . . [sic.]" by Vera Brosgol
It's a character story. A girl, um, unnamed. Girl gets grows wings. On her back. And her friend, a boy, teases her about it. Charming, funny. Some witty dialogue and expressively drawn faces that allows us to feel as we've known the characters forever in a only a few frames. The only reproach (mild) is that the characters . . . they remained the same. It's like TV, where after five seasons, the character was still the same as s/he'd been on season one. But that's not much a detraction, because I'm hoping the story will continue on FLIGHT, Volume Two.

"Outside My Window" by Khang Lee
Again, reat work with the colors. I noticed there were dominant shades, and spent a while trying to dinf a theme in them, but gave up and just enjoyed it. Very cute style. Oh yes, the story. "Outside My Window" opens on a blue butterfly in a glass jar. It's about a girl who wakes up and finds that she's been brought to a strange place by a giant robot, who wants to be her friend. She gets a pony. And all sorts of wonderful things are provided. But she's unhappy. She wants to go home. I really loved this piece.

"The Maiden and the River Spirit" by Derek Kirk Kim
Funny. A play on Aesop's "Mercury and the Woodsman" fable. Don't want to spoil it. But take my word, it's worth the read.

It wasn't perfect, but the first volume of this wonderful series was filled with enough good stories for me to recommend it. Read it, and please do check out the other volumes in the FLIGHT series. ( )

Dreamy. And managed to find me some new artists to follow! What more could I ask? ( )