The Gathering: Pulp Heroes – Review

By: Too many to list, or even to review—check out the issue.

The Story: One serving of comic book stories, please—extra pulp.

The Review: Much as I’ve appreciated what GrayHaven’s trying to do with its anthologies, I’ve always found them a little misguided in execution.  With each contributor only getting three or four pages to himself, the most he can deliver is not a fully-formed story, but something closer to a sketch or a thought-piece.  In a comic, three to four pages are enough for a few good jokes and maybe an interesting visual/idea, but you it’s hard to get a proper beginning, middle, and end.

This is why the vast majority of Gathering features tend to feel frustratingly insubstantial; the writers attempt to do too much with their three or four pages of exposure and sell themselves short as a result.  The ones who find the most measure of success use their limited time efficiently, setting up and delivering a good punchline, but largely avoiding any greater depth than that.  They simply don’t have the space to spare for that kind of thing.

The Gathering: Ghost Stories – Review

By: Too many to list, and too many to even review—check out the issue.

The Story: I just get this haunting feeling that we’re not alone here.

The Review: It’s been a while since I’ve done one of these, hasn’t it?  The fault is entirely mine.  I’m not much of a digital reading kind of person (for now); GrayHaven comics aren’t readily available at my shop; and frankly, I’m not convinced that I really want to go out of my way to obtain any.  As admirable as GrayHaven’s objectives may be, they haven’t really produced anything you’d consider truly remarkable.

They only suffer even further by comparison to their more polished, bigger-name peers, and unfortunately, Vertigo’s Ghosts is a direct parallel to this latest volume of The Gathering.  On a purely structural level, Ghosts already has a leg up on this issue in Vertigo’s choice to allow for longer features, generally resulting in more substantial, satisfying tales.  It’s the difference between eating a Hershey’s Kiss and a Hershey bar; neither fill you up like a full-blown meal, but one at least keeps you happy for a longer time afterward.

The Gathering Volume 3: Heroes – Review

By: Too many to list—check out the review, although there’s too many to review also.

The Story: Anyone can be a hero: kids, teens, old men, killer clowns—wait, what?

The Review: Anthologies can be tough to review, because you’re essentially judging the whole by the sum of its disconnected parts.  It’d be one thing if these parts all hit pretty much the same level of quality, but more than likely they’ll swing wildly between the extremes of great to terrible, and everywhere in between.  Ultimately, the question you may have to ask is: do the best pieces make up for the worst?

Thankfully, you don’t have to ask this question today (or at least, I don’t), as the newest volume of The Gathering delivers an overall solid effort from all its contributions.  You can attribute that to the format change; gone are the two-page pieces in favor of a handful of longer works.  Not only does this lend greater depth to the plots, but it allows for greater freedom in pacing.  You now get a real sense of rise and fall from the stories, making them that much more engaging.

Even with these improvements, the greater breadth of the stories is largely predictable.  Very frequently, you just need to see a couple pages of setup and halfway through you already know how the plot will pan out: the old man’s going to fade out in the end (cue the flatline heart-rate monitor); the kid knows where the missing girl is and he’s going to save her; Teen Angel and her embittered younger-turned-older brother will team up once again to rescue Beacon City.  These stories aren’t written poorly, but they don’t do enough to refresh old fiction formulas.

The strongest pieces in the collection aren’t even necessarily more original (whatever that means) in any way.  Lian and Ethan Goletz and Donal Delay’s “The Circus of Doom” features two kids taking down a circus of demon clowns and crazy monkeys—cute, but hardly groundbreaking.  You don’t know if the whole thing’s a daydream or for real, how the kids got into the vigilante biz, or even their names.  The story takes you right into the silly, kiddish action and keeps you there (the deceptively refined doodle-art also brings the wacky adventure to life); you feel its charm rather than having it told to you.

The Gathering 2011 – Review

By: Too many to list.

The Story: Come along this comic journey through the other side of despair—ghost children, shark men, and cookie-eating villains included.

The Review: GrayHaven’s anthology venture is an interesting addition to the world of comics.  By appearances, its format comes closest to DC’s annuals: a multitude of brief pieces by a whole posse of writers and artists.  But being an indie product, The Gathering looks and feels less polished, and its stylistic aims clearly have no intention of imitating the mainstream appeal of the Big Two publishers.

Whereas annuals have the feel of a short story collection, Gathering’s series of two-page pieces come across more like poetry.  Nearly all the contributions have some kind of narrative driving their intensity, but you’re not really meant to get conventional storytelling.  It’s best to read these works as you would poems: don’t look for character or plot development—it’s impossible to get much of either in two pages—and really embrace the emotional impressions they give you.

In similar fashion to annuals, a running theme loosely ties the anthology together.  In this case, Gathering seeks to discover, as the issue’s title indicates, “the other side of despair.”  Most of the contributors respond with stories of hope, though a few make efforts to play with that concept, so the whole package isn’t totally uplifting or inspiring.  The nice thing about the collection is with so many different flavors, you’re bound to enjoy something in there.

Content-wise, there’s little separating the best pieces with the less successful ones.  Considering the theme, all the stories lean on the sentimental and, dare I say, cheesy.  What makes some of the offerings stronger than others is their grasp on the limitations of the format.  They don’t try to compensate for their restricted space by stuffing it with material, but refine their ideas to their purest essence, leaving you a strong sense of feeling even if you didn’t actually read much.

In Gail Simone’s “Brief Encounter,” there’s an almost Japanese minimalism to her word choice, so even in two pages, you get a clear sense of conflict and resolution.  It helps that artist Cassandra James blocks her panels to get the most emotional impact out of them, and her spare, clean lines boldly free up space even though there’s hardly any to spare.  Also impressive is Kevin LaPorte’s “Great White Hope,” which depicts a submerged, New Orleans-style city and its sea-diving, vigilante protector.  It artfully blends Southern Gothic, super-heroics, and disaster plotting in just about 100 words.  Amanda Rachels’ cartoonish figures are enhanced by expert paneling and moody shading.  These two stories are great samples of what this format can offer, once contributors get the hang of what they can do with it.