Mara 1-6
Writer: Brian Wood
Artist: Ming Doyle
Colours: Jordie Bellaire
So many places to start with a review of this book. It's that good. In fact, the only criticism I could possibly level is that I want more of this universe. But alas, we must make do with the six issues that this wonderful creative team has put forward.
The world of Mara is based in a future where athletics and military achievement is the highest form of success. In a world obsessed with war, the populous looks to athletics as a distraction. Our protagonist, seventeen year old Mara, is the largest star in the world's most popular sport: volleyball. Over the course of the series, we follow Mara as she struggles to adapt to a series of new found abilities. Essentially, she becomes the worlds first Superwoman. It's at once a story of how a teenager struggles to fit in to a world that she is now an outsider in, and more broadly, a story of how we as a species has become so singularly focused on athletics and war to the detriment of more noble achievements like education and culture.
The metaphor, while rather obvious, works on a number of levels. First, Wood does a great job of making us care about and relate to Mara. He only has six issues to show us the stress she feels negotiating multi-million dollar deals with sponsors; with having camera's on her at all times; with being the idol of every little girl. This empathy makes the changes that transpire even more painful. We want to see what becomes of Mara, but with every evolution, she moves further and further away from her friends and the world she knows. You'd think that in a celebrity obsessed culture, this would make her more of an idol, but it instead makes her a pariah. Forced to flee in to the waiting arms of a military who wants to use her to play an epic game of brinkmanship with their enemies, Mara is forced to confront what the point of it all has been. Where is the value in forcing girls to play volleyball from six years old?
I think the choice of volleyball for this book is also interesting. If you're a sports fan, you're probably thinking that volleyball is nowhere near as good of a game as the Big Five of soccer, football, basketball, hockey and baseball. But what really separates volleyball from those sports? Popularity? At their core, a sport in which six players volley a ball around (for a lack of a better description) is no more or less silly than a game in which players skate on a frozen rink and shoot a rubber disc into a net. And I think that's what Wood is trying to highlight. We use war metaphors to describe sports all the time. Football players are 'in the trenches.' Teammates 'go to battle for each other.' But if we were forced to say them about volleyball players? I think many would scoff. Athletics is not the same as war, and to say so can trivialize the shock and impact of war.
Finally, the art. I included the colorist in the header, as frankly, Doyle's art and Bellaire's colors work in harmony. Some of the scenes in the later issues, when Mara begins to understand the truly magnificent reach of her powers, are awe inspiring. Doyle is able to portray a sense of movement within the volleyball scenes that I think other artists would struggle with. The art team does a very good job of portraying a sense of scale, while also doing a very good job getting the emotions that Mara struggles with across in a real way.
All in all, this is one of the best series that I've read in a long time. Hopefully this team can get together for more in the future.
