2 out of 5

There’s a lot of leeway for kid’s books.  I’m not looking for gigantic character arcs or anything too out of the norm – I mean there’s like a small cache of acceptable kid lessons to teach and then we just splash some art on that and hopefully a fun spin on words, right?  And I’m aware Steve is sort of a cheesy writer.  I doubt I would’ve stuck with some of his books if a trusted friend hadn’t recommended them.  Maybe it’s the artists he pairs with – exaggerated styles like Kelly Jones’s or Teddy Kristiansen’s require a stable narrative to ground their unique look, and Seagle’s pen is pretty loose and quick and sloppy.  He’d probably be better matched with a realistic depictor… I dunno.

So I can’t say what I was hoping for or expecting with Batula, Steve’s second kids book with artist Marco Cinello, who also worked on Steve’s shitty Soul Kiss book, which was shitty because it was hastily written and the drawing style just threw that way out in the open…  But maybe this is better for a children’s book, right?  Like, simplicity, and Steve works on Ben 10, so the success of that show suggests he gets the kid mind… and I really don’t consider Steve a bad writer, as much as I can call any consistently published comic author bad, just that he writes to a certain taste in reading, and that taste idea-wise has been cool, but style-wise, for me, not so cool.

Batula is given a good send-off by Image, nice thick pages that beam the colors well, a big over-sized but thin hardcover affair, but though Cinello spins his pencils into something more kid appropriate, the round lines, thick inks, there’s something too generic about his designs and background to really make the images pop, which is shame for all the space their given.  And this is a “be yourself” story about a Bat who has to get dracula powers to learn how to accept himself for who he is, and it’s an acceptable kid setup of the outcast bat who goes in search of a new home… but there’s this lingering promise of all these adventures and fancy characters lil’ Batula will meet, and instead, after he gets the vampire bite, the story stumbles stupid quick through his “training” and like a one-page mention of a potentially interesting cast of oddball characters he meets or fights before returning home… and it’s just like, here’s where you can mine the story for fleshing out that lesson…  Maybe Steve was only allowed a certain page count and got 3/4ths through his story and then realized he was out of room, but no, I think this is sort of typical of his plotting style.

Kids are totes capable of bigger attention spans than this, even little ones.  I’m sure Steve wouldn’t deny that.  As usual, I support artists stretching their wings, and I love seeing kids books by publishers who normally don’t do that kinda’ thing, but beyond a cute concept and nice presentation, Batula doesn’t offer nearly enough for any age.