Anticipating for the imminent premiere for The Legend of Korra (successor to awesomely amazing Avatar The Last Airbender ANIMATED series)
Nickelodeon grabs my perky interest by releasing an ongoing canon graphic novel series that's supposedly closely collaborated with the producers of the original series and acting as an immediate sequel, but how much does it milk me?
Low in lactose and almost unnoticeable in stench of dairy produce the series actually continues the narrative one year later. Artwise it's pretty much intact, color (an important element) intact, dialogue intact, characterization intact, sociopolitical environment (perhaps rehashed but fitting), thematically (rehashed, the whole theme of Zuko's fear of betrayal returns, but its only the first book it can be forgiven), comedy was comedic, action sequences were understandably lost in translation due to transfer in mediums and structure works on the sequential barriers of "moment to moment narrative" of manga novels rather than "action to action" narrative of American comic books (see Scott McCloud's "Understanding Comics").
The story, Aang promises Zuko he'll kill him if he turns evil, which'll be the overall theme of this book series, which'll be a little disappointing I miss the different locales for training and misadventuring but from the look of it they may travel to different kingdoms anyway. What was missing in the story was a sense of completion, whereas each episode of the animated series was almost always episodic in nature with a sense of closure after each chapter. The Promise seems to be using a serial structure by using cliffhangers in a long uninterrupted storyline for what would traditionally have been two episodes for an ongoing plotline lined with a completed episodic subplot or two.
To explain a "series" relies on episodic structures where each episode has its own minor (subplot) storyline which is resolved by the end of the episode, this is often lined with a grand continuing storyline (or main plotline), however when the episode lacks a completed story and relies heavily on the main continuing plotline this is called a "serial". Ideally for me this 76 page book should have three complete subplots with an ongoing plotline with a sense of closure after each subplot is completed instead of the cliffhanger we were given (although in all fairness totally fitting). But outside of this it's a decent book, with a sense of atmosphere, characters in a post-fire nation world, which I'll like to see continue, but next time with more Momo who was vastly underused and unappreciated in this book.