Power Button: The First Invasion

Not to relitigate one of the most persistent debates of contemporary literature, but one of the big problems (from a critical perspective, anyway) with the recent explosion in books and comics aimed at kids is that the ideal people to critique them are the people least capable of having the tools and language to do so. That is to say: who is best to say whether kids’ comics are good for kids? Obviously, it’s kids. But kids are rarely the ones writing them, illustrating them, publishing them, marketing them, reviewing them, or even buying them. That’s all being done by crummy old adults like me.

It's grown-ups who have the technical skill to put together stories for kids; it’s grown-ups who see them through every stage of production, and who make calculated gambles, often based on a deeply imperfect recollection or understanding of what kids like (or should like), of whether or not they’ll go over with their intended audiences. Children themselves, of whatever age, are rarely part of the process in any meaningful way, and when they are, it’s usually in the context of focus groups, which are less about what the kids enjoy and more about what adults are trying to convince them to enjoy.

So it is that we end up with kid lit and young adult categories which are not only invented by adults, but which are shepherded every step of the way by adults. Whether or not you think it’s good, bad or indifferent that so many YA readers and critics aren’t young adults, that’s the reality, and the extreme noise around youth-centered genre work is usually because it’s those same grown people projecting their values on what they rightly or wrongly think kids want to read. And the more these genres become big-money propositions for publishers, the more confused the conversation is likely to become.

There’s not really a clear-cut solution to this problem. Kids, after all, just aren’t equipped to create, sustain or participate in discourse around comics and literature, and thank goodness for that; kids should be kept as far away from all this as humanly possible, for as long as humanly possible. But then, how are parents and guardians, or even kids themselves, supposed to make any kind of coherent conversation about what’s worth seeking out, and what’s just a cynical ploy to reach another market? That’s why the duty tends to fall to other adults, who often simply can’t appreciate what kids want or like, or even worse, think they can, based on some imperfect refraction of their own tastes.

All of this leads us to what’s at the top of this review. Power Button: The First Invasion is a major foray into kids' comics by indie comics veteran Zack Soto (The Secret Voice and the Study Group Comics web and print publisher, among others), released on the Graphic Universe imprint of Lerner Publishing and aimed squarely at a middle school audience. It’s a big, sprawling narrative, and it’s obviously meant to be the initial outing in an ongoing series; to get back to that point about how the genre is often just a marketing gimmick meant to generate as much revenue as possible, Lerner is releasing “The First Invasion” in the clear hopes that it won’t be the last. Franchises are where the money is, and–fairly obvious spoiler alert–the book ends on a cliffhanger that unquestionably assumes that there’s more to come.

Power Button tells a lively but familiar story. Kaz Savage is a 10-year old kid with bad eyesight and typical nerd enthusiasms who lives with his parents in the fictional town of Windrip, Oregon, not far from Soto’s own Portland. His older cousin Truly comes to visit for a while as her mother, a famous entertainer, works out the kinks in her marriage. But that’s all just background noise for when they discover a secret lair built by Kaz’s parents and filled with all manner of mysterious doo-dads, the trappings of their former lives as… archeologist secret agents? Something like that. As with a lot in the book, it’s not particularly clear.

Before too long, a bratty teenage galactic conqueror called Lord Maximo Skulldigg comes calling, sent on a fool’s errand to take over Earth. The only thing that can (and does) stop him is the intervention of an Omega Knight named Trinn Cyclo, a powerful guardian of freedom and justice the kids accidentally summon to do battle with Lord Maximo and his flunkies. A big high-tech punch-‘em-up follows, tied in some unrevealed way to Kaz’s and Truly’s families, and the alien invasion just kind of falls apart until Cyclo’s inevitable return, to “defend Earth… against the Horde’s next attack!” That’s about all there is to it.

Does Power Button deserve a sequel? Is there anything in its 200 pages that justifies another outing? Well… if you ask me, and I’m the one steering the boat on this one, not really. The best thing about the book is Soto’s art (with the assistance of Jason Fischer-Kouhi); it combines the rough edges of a lot of 21st century indie press work with goofy kid lit cartooning for a unique look that’s impossible to dislike. But the story is predictable and dull, the book is wildly over-padded with pages and pages of filler art, and characterization is practically nonexistent.

For such a sprawling narrative, we get to know almost nothing about any of the characters, terrestrial or otherwise (including some who seem fascinating, like Kaz’s Uncle Lucky, a humanoid cat). The kids and their parents just watch most of the action instead of participating in it, making it look like they’re passively taking in a video game or a cartoon and rendering the stakes awfully low. The snarky narration doesn’t add much to the story, and when it’s all over we don’t know much more than we did when it started, leaving us to wonder why we should care about another installment.

Of course, that’s my reading, as an adult without kids. Maybe kids would absolutely love the book; maybe they wouldn’t. But until we have a more honest way to assess the kind of cultural production we aim at children, it’s all we’ve got, and it leaves me feeling like this is just a hapless work that brims with good ideas but doesn’t take them anywhere. It has its charms, but they wouldn’t have been enough to grab me when I was 10, let alone now.

The post Power Button: The First Invasion appeared first on The Comics Journal.