a selection of reviews from our database
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Adrenaline GN Posted 08 Jun 2009Writer: Tyler Chin-Tanner
Reviewed by Adam McGovern |
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From the 1930s through the ’80s, the comics medium never met a trend it couldn’t market – with varying success, but unwavering enthusiasm – from youth gangs to CB radio. That’s fallen away, maybe because the medium’s gotten less mercenary, maybe because these days comics themselves are the trend.
“Writer Tyler Chin-Tanner delivers the realty genre’s drama of death-defying stunts in remote, spectacular locales while seeing clearly into the personal depths.”
Still, it’s surprising that so little has been done with the reality-show phenomenon, which marks not a fad but a permanent shift in our relation to the domain of fantasy and the mechanisms of publicity. Adrenaline makes the most of it. Like the sharpest reality-contest stars, this book is in the moment and several steps ahead of it. Started before the worldwide financial bust, Adrenaline’s story of athletes and adventurers from economically desperate countries, dead-end crisis-zones and precarious affluent elevations competing for everything from thrills to medicine for their village saw the neo-Great Depression mindset coming, and does exciting, insightful things with essential human conflicts and reactions that don’t change as much as we think they do.
The series started strong, and stayed that way artistically, but was dropped by the modern-day distribution trust of Diamond; now it’s back, and completed, by taking advantage of another fruitful trend, the bookstore-ready collection, and it’s an adventure you don’t want to be left out of.
Jump on – or, more accurately, off, a mountain, or into the sea, or down a snowy ski-slope, as two teams of ex-soldiers, bored athletes, and determined public-servant survivors brave staged disasters no less dangerous and no more manufactured than the wars and starvation some of them left at home. The cameras roll as cutthroat office politics play out behind the scenes of a TV network where various would-be heirs carry on their own competition for the feudal fortunes left in the vacuum of a CEO’s recent demise. The show’s stars are pawns, to either make one network faction rich with a hit or be jettisoned with extreme prejudice by others who consider them budgetary baggage.
Writer Tyler Chin-Tanner does a good job of delivering the realty genre’s drama of death-defying stunts in remote, spectacular locales while seeing clearly into the personal depths the cameras can’t catch. Every character feels cheated by life in one way or another, and in a contest with rivals they feel deserve life’s rewards less, they move toward a conclusion that will make everyone ask new questions about what’s really worth it to them, and why. Chin-Tanner’s layouts lend a widescreen excitement throughout, with James Boyle’s art and color bringing an up-to-the-minute animation/sports-graphic texture and an assurance with location detail and human expression that increases over the run.
Who will set the agenda on high? Who must risk everything, and who gets to just watch? Who will become wealthy, and who will be laid off – fatally? These are questions Adrenaline is right in time for, transformed into the kind of entertainment everyone can feel a true part of. Vote it onto your bookshelf now!
[Adrenaline is available in August – even from Diamond: order number JUN090720.]