Story by James Patterson, Art by NaRae Lee
Yen Press, 260 pp.
Rating: Teen

I cannot speak for the novel upon which Maximum Ride is based, but the manga adaptation of James Patterson’s book is not a very promising read. The main characters are not especially compelling, the artwork seems like a poor fit at times, and the plot fails to hold up to scrutiny. On the bright side, there are certain story elements that lend themselves well to visual depiction—specifically, the protagonists soar in mid-air via wings sprouting from their backs—but frankly, winged humans have been depicted in art long enough that it should be impossible to screw those up.

Maximum Ride centers on a group of winged teens led by the maternal Max, who is especially close to Angel, a little girl with psychic powers to go with her wings. They’re all escapees from a research facility and are attempting to lie low. Unfortunately, the series opens with fang-toothed, muscle-bound thugs called “Erasers” descending from a helicopter, beating the stuffing out of the “flock” and dragging Angel away.

Not surprisingly, pursuit and rescue is the protagonists’ immediate course of action. To that end, Max gathers a posse, puts together a plan, takes off with said team and quickly gets sidetracked by the sight of another little girl getting bullied. One assumes she is supposed to remind Max of Angel, and that Max is compelled to help her because she failed to prevent Angel’s kidnapping. But at a time when focus on the task at hand should be most important, what she does seems frustratingly inexplicable and not reflective of good leadership abilities. (It also doesn’t help that the side journey introduces a plot point that gets almost immediately dropped.)

Artist NaRae Lee does a good job capturing Max and company in flight, but her clean art style is occasionally a poor match for the book’s grittier elements. For example, when Max runs afoul of some thugs during the aforementioned side trip, they are rendered in far too cartoonish a way to be menacing, even when one breaks out a gun. Meanwhile, the Erasers are uniformly bland-looking villains with inexplicable shape-changing abilities; for the most part, they bear a curious resemblance to Blanka from Street Fighter 2, but in one scene they’re werewolves for whatever reason. Either way, their personalities are about as uninspired as their physical appearance, and they’re given such an advantage over Max and friends—despite the fact they can’t fly—that the intermittent fight scenes are rarely compelling.

As if Maximum Ride didn’t have enough working against it, the first volume ends on one of those twists calibrated to make you question what came before. In this case, we’re left wondering if the villains took Angel and left the others behind on purpose, the point being to test the heroes’ skills, perseverance and capacity to work as a team. Only Max and the flock fail utterly. After they are ingloriously captured and brought before their nemesis, Max gets paid compliments for being “so powerful” and “such a good leader,” which given how ineptly their rescue plan went, seems like unearned praise.

Neither Max nor this book will get the same courtesy from me.

Volume one of Maximum Ride is available now.