Serenity: Bad Girls, Comics Fans and Christian Manga
This story originally appeared in PW Comics Week on January 31, 2006 Sign up now!
by Laurel Maury, PW Comics Week -- Publishers Weekly, 1/31/2006
Serenity: Bad Girl in Town by comics veteran Buzz Dixon, with art by Min Kwon, is one of the first Christian manga to appear in the U.S. market. Other manga titles have incorporated Christian iconography into their story lines before, but Serenity is the first to actually promote Christian themes. The surprise is that, although it's about a bad girl and a prayer group, Serenity is actually a nice little read.
Serenity, the new girl in school, wants to be the world's worst blue-haired badass, but the truth is she's the lonely daughter of an alcoholic mom, who, in a moment of hope, named her child for the serenity prayer. Enter the school's Christian group, led by the gorgeous and hip Derek and his friend Kimberly. They decide to take on Serenity as a project—whether she likes it or not. High-jinks ensue: Serenity steals money; almost flunks her drug test; and then Tinkerbell, her pet tarantula, gets loose and scares the school. The book is a pretty little thing, pure shojo, in color; it's the sort of pop-sparkly item likely to grab the attention of consumers. The plot is easy to follow and never drags but the plot line in #3 can feel a bit canned. And all those lessons about relationships that you find in shojo, anyway, seem to offer a pretty good fit with the morality Serenity wants to promote.
But creator Buzz Dixon has an uphill battle. Comics aficionados don't like Serenity. "We've gotten a lot of really negative feedback on our Web site and in online reviews simply because it's Christian," says Dixon. A lot of Christians don't like Serenity, either. "We've had an on-air interview with a Christian outlet cancelled—it was in Hastings, Texas." Unfamiliar with manga, the interviewer had picked up some at a bookstore. He didn't like what he saw. Another Christian critic objected to an image of Serenity putting on a pair of shorts. "I don't know what to tell these people except that we can't sugar-coat this stuff too much, or it won't reflect kids' real world, what they see in the media," says Dixon. But none of that may matter. Wal-Mart likes it, and the chain is going to start carry it in June, when vol. #4 is out.
Serenity isn't sugar-coated. Derek is a recovering alcoholic. Kimberly, the pastor's daughter, can be nasty, but she's a good leader. Sally, a cute African-American, who blackmails Serenity into attending prayer group, is upbeat and the smartest of the bunch, but her mother is in a wheelchair. The teacher who supports the Christians on campus has a hook instead of a right hand. It's a world with broken people—real people.
Dixon and his marketing partner, Marlon Schulman, know what they're doing. Dixon started in comics 20 years ago writing pages for no less than Jack Kirby, creator of The Fantastic Four. Then he wrote for animation: G.I. Joe, Transformers, even the girly cartoon My Little Pony, so he knows how to write a fast plot that doesn't skimp on character. Schulman worked for Bandai in the mid '90s, and founded AnimeVillage with them in '97-'98. And artist Min Kwon, who moved from Korea to New Jersey in her teens, is straight out of the Rutgers' art program and conversant with the now-popular style of Korean manga. Unfortunately, Serenity's weakest point is the art. It's stiff, the backgrounds are lifeless, and the images feel secondary to the story. Kwon hasn't yet tapped into the subtlety of Korean manga, and her work lacks the gorgeous visual overload of the good Japanese stuff.
Serenity isn't a classic the in making. It's not Full Metal Alchemist, but it's good enough manga. And although comics-lovers might find the Christian aspect annoying, and Christians might find the comics aspect annoying, at least one higher power has smiled on it—the power of Wal-Mart. This summer, a lot of kids associated with neither hard-core Christians nor comic-cons are going to be thumbing through Serenity—I predict many will like what they see.
