When someone you love gives you Avatar; the last airbender you really know you’re good at picking people to love. Still the tv-show was over far too fast and it left a sadness in my life, like reading the last, final chapter of Harry Potter back when J.K Rowling actually had us convinced she’d never touch the story again.
So when I got the Avatar; The Promise comics for Christmas I put them on my bookshelf and for many months enjoyed simply walking past them; knowing that Aang and Katara and Sokka lived safely inside going on adventures that I had yet to know. I saved them like the last drops of lamp oil; waiting for the deepest of darkness to ignite them.
I’m not saying public transportation is awful, but yeah, that was my deepest darkness. I brought The last promise along for a 4 hour train ride. I tried to read them slowly, dwell on the face of the characters I love so much. But it was just too good and I read them all. Then I read them again, but it was too late; I’d sucked all the adventures out of the universe. There was no more.
I love these comics. They capture the tone and the flawed personalities perfectly. Avatar, the tv-show, was always carried through by tight knit friendships where the flaws blossomed, where the personality traits of one helped develop character in the other. Katara might start every episode with her belief that Aang can save the world, but he would have been lost without the ingenuity of Sokka, the brilliance of Katara and the spontaneity of Toph. Avatar Aang is wise and gentle – but it is always his greatest weakness as it is in the Promise. Zukko makes Aang promise that he will kill him if he ever falls back into evil. A promise Aang makes out of the goodness in him, but when it all goes down, will he be able to kill his friend for the greater good?
The promise is a great read – nothing spectacular, but it delivers exactly what lovers of the TV-show want. So when the last page came I was left with a sadness. A sadness of never getting to experience it again – for the first time. A sadness that is both beautiful and tragic and that I, thankfully, meet time and time again over the course of my last. The last Firefly, The last Doctor and the last Avatar.
New Avatar books (so not actually quite the last chapter…) have been announced and I look forward to the sweet, tangy sadness of another wonderful end.
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