Water Tribe FTW
The decision to make the trip to APE (Alternative Press Expo) in San Francisco this year was totally spur-of-the-moment, but worked out much better than the soggy, rain-ladden venture we made last year. Plenty of sunshine and a great parking spot made a great start, and I found both a Catbutt City mug as well as some delicious copies of Johane Matte’s Water Tribe that I’ve been eying online for ages (see her artwork on DeviantArt here). I was thrilled to find the books in print.
Water Tribe is a good read. There are some typos in the second book that were a little distracting, but overall, you gotta love this story about the attempts towards redemption of Matte’s alternate universe Admiral Zhao. In this version, Zhao somehow survives the final battle at the Northern Water Tribe in Avatar Book One: Water (aka Season 1) and ends up an amnesiac and mostly harmless simpleton on the Northern Water Tribe shores. But redemption can have many meanings to a man with Zhao’s past, and recovering that past puts him at odds with the people in the Water Tribe who have grown to accept him as one of their own.
The story picks up as Zhao has all but recovered his former arrogance and ambitions, but not his memories. Matte gives us a wonderfully believable, angst-ridden incarnation of the formerly villainous Avatar character. Not quite reformed, but struggling poignantly against the loss of his former status and memories, Zhao lives admirably up to the standards of a Byronic anti-hero. Despite plumbing the depths of Zhao’s obsessive personality and dark past, however, Matte never lets the tone of the story fall into depression, combining wit with physical humor resonant with the optimistic tone of the established Avatar series.
Matte carries on Avatar’s tradition of blending serious soul-searching with epic action, high fantasy, and a wonderfully fleshed out, often humorous side-cast. All in all, it feels like a worthy spin-off of the original, although this publication is purely fan-created and has no official recognition. (It probably won’t surprise you to know that she’s also a professional artist working for the Nickelodeon magazine on official Avatar strips. But as Water Tribe is a fan side project, all proceeds are all being donated to charity.) For fans still hankering for more of our beloved Nickelodeon series, reading Water Tribe is like adventuring in the world of Avatar all over again.