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Plaid Avenger #1
Posted 11 May 2009
Writer: John Boyer (creator and co-scripter); Klaus Shmidheiser (co-scripter)
Artist: Klaus Shmidheiser
Colors: Klaus Shmidheiser, Richard Miller, Erin Nolan
Publisher: www.plaidavenger.com
3.00 out of 5 Stars
Reviewed by Adam McGovern
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Time was when solid-color theme heroes like Green Lantern
and Green Arrow would expose social ills and confront personified
menaces of the military-industrial complex. The world has gotten
less simple, so today we need the Plaid Avenger to explore the
tangled tapestry of geopolitics.
The character is the creation of a kind of Tweed Avenger,
real-life Virginia Tech geography teacher John Boyer. Boyer’s
interests touch on natural resources and the blurry boundaries
between nations competing to control them, and he finds whatever
way he can to get students informed and interested about how this
will shape the future and impact their lives. Among other methods,
he’s hit on this relatively well-produced and attractive
comicbook.
A public-service superspy who’s here to
help us see the patterns.
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The first issue introduces us to “Plaidie,” a
weird tartan-suited playboy whose amateur pass at the Alaskan
Iditarod is interrupted when he takes a wrong turn into the Arctic
and encounters a surrealistic outdoor table-full of world leaders
there to symbolically carve up the area for its oil and shipping
rights as the polar ice shrinks. Soon he’s infiltrating a
Russian sub when Vladimir Putin crashes the party (and the
ice-shelf) to claim that the whole area belongs to him. The Plaid
Avenger uncovers the various leaders’ schemes and notifies
the indigenous locals they’re screwed in time to get back to
his own bathysphere for martinis with a Bond-girl-esque
aide-de-camp (and I do mean camp).
Then it’s on to some brisk text pages in which the
Avenger himself instructs students and other readers on what they
can do to counteract global warming and the screwing of the Pole
more effectively than the comic’s well-informed but
entertainingly feckless hero. The series is accompanied by an
ongoing blog, also in-character, about similar global, erm, hot
spots. At 36 full-color pages the package is a class act, and
artist Klaus Shmidheiser is an expressive and witty cartoonist with
few missteps.
As a writing team, Boyer and Shmidheiser could use some
polishing. A little cross-disciplinary consultation with a Virginia
Tech English teacher could’ve told them where to end this
sentence, concerning the Arctic interlopers’ self-evidently
snowbound secret spoils-splitting session: “I mean it
isn’t the most convenient place to get together…
although, it must make the ‘wine chilling’ a much
easier task, considering the abundance of ice.” And even the
English-class students could’ve told them that
“perspective” doesn’t mean the same thing as
“respective.” But the creative team does have its
current-events facts straight, and the goofy exuberance makes up
for a lot of the work-in-progress professionalism. Across the
landscape of small-press comics, the line between cheesy homemade
propaganda and idiosyncratic indie alt-commentary is as thin as the
receding ice-cap, but I’m convinced that the Plaid Avenger is
fighting on the right side.
—CCdC—
Cover image used with permission of the publisher.
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