Advance Review: The New York Four

6 Comments | Posted: July 1st, 2008 | Filed under: Reviews

1.
The booming tween media market seems to indicate that middle schoolers want stories about high-schoolers (High School Musical) while high-schoolers want to get the adventures of college-aged people (The Hills). For the first time in the line’s brief history, I think a Minx graphic novel has managed to match its central characters (four NYU freshmen) with its audience (young women still in high school.) This isn’t to say that The Re-Gifters and Good as Lily aren’t good, but this is the first book that shows an awareness of who the readers are outside of a vague “Kids, right?”

2.
Brian Wood’s love affair with New York, shown in The Couriers and DMZ, continues and while more cynical comics readers may roll their eyes a bit at his enthusiatic descriptions of locations like Prospect Park (“Designed by the same guy who did the much more famous Central Park in Manhattan, but this is the one he says is his masterpiece,”) the target audience (them again) is likely to find it charming. Personally, I’m crazy in love with the city and liked how he managed to offer captions that were part guidebook, part narrative guideposts.

3.
Ryan Kelly’s art sings. His ability to design believably-attractive young women is the sort of thing that could get him very far if somebody outside of the world of comics takes notice. There’s a little manga, a little Paul Pope, and a lot of black ink slung around to great effect. His on-page pacing and ability to deliver on the dramatic and quiet has never been sharper, and it’s obvious that working with Wood on Local has served as a boot camp of sorts – compare the last issue of that series and this book against his work on Lucifer and the growth is remarkable.

4.
One of Wood’s strengths as a writer is his character work, and it’s interesting to see him play with common tropes of “young adult” fiction. There’s reclusive, text-message-addicted Riley, the lead for this story, whose reunion with her estranged sister leads her to open herself up a bit and befriend the three others; rich, insecure Merissa who uses her sex appeal to get what she wants; Lona Lo, the quiet, grade-obsessed girl with a dark streak and Ren, the tomboy who may or may not be bugfuck crazy. While there may not be a fistful of nuance applied to the dialogue or how the plot plays out, everything’s believable, particularly the character actions and how the story impacts them.

5.
It’s obvious that this is the first in a series, but once again, Minx has not noted this in any way. There’s some storylines hinted at – Lona’s obsession with a professor, Merissa’s problem with maintaining her grades – that are not developed in any meaningful way before the book’s end. Is it that difficult to stick in a Bond-style “The New York Four will return in…Rocktapussy” or something at the end, or just start numbering the spines right off? Maybe they’re a little gunshy about promising a series when there’s an unproven first volume, but it does feel a bit frustrating when you reach the last page and so much is left unanswered.

6.
This is very definitely recommended, particularly for high school librarians. This could be one of those watershed comics for young women, going beyond the manga market.

---