Customer Reviews

Noble Causes Archives Volume 1 (v. 1)

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Nobles Causes is an excellent series, a sprawling soap opera story mixed with superheroics. Jay Faerber writes interesting characters and consistently surprising reveals, and a number of very good artists have contributed over the title's various mini-series and ongoing series.

That said, beware of this volume! The price might seem right for what you're getting, but there are significant downsides. The paper quality is not very good and the volume feels flimsy. Covers are NOT included in the volume, just shown as dime-size thumbnails on the back cover. And most frustratingly, the entire book is in BLACK AND WHITE! The original comics were all in full colour, so seeing them reduced to greyscale is a huge shock.

3 stars since it's still a great series, but buying the individual collected volumes is much better than this sub-standard offering.

For $19.99, this collection is very cheap given that it has 598 pages. The catch is that it is printed in black and white instead of color. However, I like the idea of having the series reprinted in two huge volumes instead of needing to get many trades.

Given that I never read this series in color, I don't know what I am missing, but what I can say is that Noble Causes as it is, is fantastic. The comic follows the Noble family, a family of superheroes. This superhero comic book differs from most in that the essence of the story does not boil down to fights with supervillains. The story is driven by characters. We get to meet very interesting superheroes in scenarios that we normally don't see in superhero comic books. A teenage heroine that gets pregnant. Marital problems between two superheroes. The whole series moves more like a soap opera than an action series, but it does in a very entertaining way. I can't help but care about these characters.

One character I like a lot is "Rusty". Rusty was a very powerful superhero that almost died in a battle. His father, being a scientific genius, transferred his mind to a robot (reminding me of Doom Patrol's Metal Man). Rusty has marital problems because of this and after the divorce he finds true happiness with a heroine that has the power of manipulating metal. All of a sudden, Rusty is able to feel again because of his new girlfriend. Rusty goes from being an annoying, mean character to being a very nice, kind character. The isolation he had because of being unable to feel had changed him, but love brought him back to the kind man he once was. This is the sort of thing I enjoyed a lot about Noble Causes, the characters change right in front of our eyes, little by little.

Another character I love is Gaia. She seems to be a really cold, calculating woman. She gives great one-liners that shut up everybody and she is cold when it relates to spinning the stories to the media about the family. However, Gaia has a bastard child, Frost, and when we see in flashbacks how Gaia was tender when seeing Frost and how Gaia loves Doc, we see another side of her. We see the personality that she wants to hide from the outside world, the vulnerability that only her husband and Frost have seen. She was hurt by her husband before, so now she shields that from everyone else with extra zeal. This is the sort of thing that the author conveys to us through images and dialogue. A fantastic job.

The series has very clean pencils, which I think help the story move smoothly. This story is not about exploring with beautiful images, but about understanding characters.

I liked the art and I love the writing. This is a great series to check out and for a very good price.

Noble Causes is breath of fresh air in the tired realm of mainstream superhero comics. While the big names like Spider Man do their best to retreat from change, Noble Causes embraces it and uses change to tell some very solid character-driven stories.

This volume has almost SIX HUNDRED pages of story. Reprinting 4 Noble Causes miniseries (16 issues total) and then 12 issues of the ongoing. Characters live and die, marry and divorce, children are born, and nothing stays the same.

Faerber manages to include innovative twists the will shock even the most jaded comic readers. Even tired cliches like 'back from the dead' get new, refreshing twists.

Best of all Faerber manages to keep his characters walking a fine line between idealized superheroes and the sort of superhero decadence seen in books like The Boys. The Nobles can be petty, they make mistakes, they get drunk, they have affairs, they fight, but in the end they are still good people. It's a tough trick to pull off but Faerber manages it.

My one complaint is the quality of the reproduction. Image's archives books deliver so much story as such low prices because they're in black and white. However unlike DC's Showcase books or Marvel's Essential series this book was reproduced from the colored pages so the art is sometime muddy. Other B&W reprints seem to work from the inked pages so the line work is clean and clear. But though the reproduction is a bit annoying it should not distract from the high-quality story and the low, low price.

I'm looking forward to Vol 2 of the archives later this year.

This massive grayscale volume collects five trade paperbacks' worth of Jay Faerber's "Noble Causes" title that features the Noble family of wealthy, celebrity superheroes and is often described as a "superhero soap opera". It includes the 2002 introductory one-shot and four-issue monthly run, then the "Family Secrets" and "Distant Relatives" mini-series and the first 12 issues of the resumed 2004 monthly series. Fran Bueno provides the majority of the penciling, and Ian Richardson, Andres Ponce and Patrick Gleason also handle multiple issues. The first 400 pages are the normal-length main story arcs and the last 100 pages are anticillary snapshots of key Noble family moments.

While the lack of color is an obvious drawback, at least the grayscale is an improvement on Marvel Comics' comparable budget-priced "Essential" line that is limited to simple pencils and inks. This fun collection provides hours of entertaining reading and seems ideal for a long plane ride.