The Gathering Volume 3: Heroes – Review

By: Too many to list—check out the review, although there’s too many to review also.

The Story: Anyone can be a hero: kids, teens, old men, killer clowns—wait, what?

The Review: Anthologies can be tough to review, because you’re essentially judging the whole by the sum of its disconnected parts.  It’d be one thing if these parts all hit pretty much the same level of quality, but more than likely they’ll swing wildly between the extremes of great to terrible, and everywhere in between.  Ultimately, the question you may have to ask is: do the best pieces make up for the worst?

Thankfully, you don’t have to ask this question today (or at least, I don’t), as the newest volume of The Gathering delivers an overall solid effort from all its contributions.  You can attribute that to the format change; gone are the two-page pieces in favor of a handful of longer works.  Not only does this lend greater depth to the plots, but it allows for greater freedom in pacing.  You now get a real sense of rise and fall from the stories, making them that much more engaging.

Even with these improvements, the greater breadth of the stories is largely predictable.  Very frequently, you just need to see a couple pages of setup and halfway through you already know how the plot will pan out: the old man’s going to fade out in the end (cue the flatline heart-rate monitor); the kid knows where the missing girl is and he’s going to save her; Teen Angel and her embittered younger-turned-older brother will team up once again to rescue Beacon City.  These stories aren’t written poorly, but they don’t do enough to refresh old fiction formulas.

The strongest pieces in the collection aren’t even necessarily more original (whatever that means) in any way.  Lian and Ethan Goletz and Donal Delay’s “The Circus of Doom” features two kids taking down a circus of demon clowns and crazy monkeys—cute, but hardly groundbreaking.  You don’t know if the whole thing’s a daydream or for real, how the kids got into the vigilante biz, or even their names.  The story takes you right into the silly, kiddish action and keeps you there (the deceptively refined doodle-art also brings the wacky adventure to life); you feel its charm rather than having it told to you.

In fact, that’s the common denominator to the most successful pieces: they just deliver the story as is, letting you fill in the expository gaps.  They don’t feel as conclusive as the other pieces, nor do they give you as much back-story to the characters, but it’s those missing answers that keep you curious and invested into the stories even after you’re done reading.

Len N. Wallace and Brenda Liz Lopez’s continuing “Zipper Club” feature doesn’t do much to flesh out the kids’ pasts as heart disease recoverees, but the point is to see how they’ll make use of their second chances at life.  Nothing dramatic or game-changing happens in the story, but you can’t help feeling satisfied by the ending: the kids play ball, annoy each other, and work out their puppy-love crushes, and do it so well you forget about their conditions—mission accomplished.

The constant switches between the painted fantasy panels and sketchy “back to reality” panels in “Thank You” may be confusing at first, as the connections between them aren’t always clear and John M. Coker and Aaron Bir don’t offer many clues.  Eventually you realize the emotional layers of one panel clarify or emphasize the ones in the next, creating a sense of growth in the unnamed protagonist without ever delving into any of his specific conflicts.  It’s a fully-realized coming-of-age story without any actual coming-of-age scenes, which is quite remarkable.

And then you have a story like “Alone With the Crow King,” by Ignacio Segura and Paula Cob, which delivers a pretty traditional story structure—intro, rising action, climax, end—but leaves a bunch of open-ended plot elements in its midst.  What is the Crow King—supernatural creature or metaphor for something more abstract?  Is Nicky a boy-hero in the tradition of Harry Potter or a boy who gets strength from knowing a little of life’s dark side?  Was Anna taken by the Crow King, or did she deliver herself?  The dual nature of this story gives it intriguing depth, which a longer medium would demand much more explicit explanations from.

Conclusion: Another commendable effort from GrayHaven Comics, which is slowly starting to figure out how to make the best use of its format.

Grade: B

– Minhquan Nguyen