5.0 out of 5 stars
Art saves!, 18 Feb 2011
This review is from: The Plain Janes (Paperback)
Inspiring book, great art and story. I love the art/activism theme, what the girls do at the end of the book. Buying this for a few artists I know!
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5.0 out of 5 stars
Live, Laught, Love through Art, 6 May 2010
This review is from: The Plain Janes (Paperback)
To start off, I do not read a lot of graphic novels. I haven't collected comics in over 20 years. The few graphic novels I have read in the last 5 years, I have either been asked to review, or liked the author's other works and gave them a try. With this one I was very hesitant; it was about a group of girls in high school, and yet I loved it. I enjoyed it so much I read it twice back to back and cannot wait to read the sequel Janes in Love.
The story is set shortly after 9/11 and features a girl, Jane, who was near one of the blasts. Her whole life is turned upside down. He parents move her to a small town. Her mother is not getting better from the shock of 9/11; she is getting more frightened, and protective and a little paranoid. Jane was popular and in the 'in crowd' at her old school in the city. Here she decided to make conscious changes; she joins the outcast, a group of Plain Janes, who are:
Jane - DramaticJane
Jayne - BrainJayne
Polly Jane - SportyJane
Jane - MainJane
Together they form a group called P.L.A.I.N. - People Loving Arts in neighborhoods. They perform some random acts to make people think and appreciate the world around them and the beauty we can see every day but not notice.
The story is great. It has a message every high school student and maybe every adult could learn from. It is incredibly well written and Jim Rugg did an amazing job illustrating the story. I have a feeling this will become one of those books I read annually because there will be more I can get from it each time I read it.
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5.0 out of 5 stars
Gripping Entertainment, 13 Sep 2007
This review is from: The Plain Janes (Paperback)
The new Minx series is sweeping away 50 years of tired fantasy-led men-in-tight-spandex nerd and geek-dominated comic book history in the US and UK.
This latest offering captures exactly the existentialism of being a teenage girl transported by her parents to a new location and high school. The artwork is first-class in crisp and clear monochrome. The backplot concerns the aftermath of a bombing in somewhere like London - but the real plots are about the need for friendship, the angst of teenage relationships and the redeeming value of art as subversion of the status quo.
It's simply wonderful. The writer, Cecil Castelucci, who also has one of the world's funniest blogs - check it out - seems to have dropped from the sky as the new messiah of the comic book industry.
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