Kim Possible Cine-Manga

    (Tokyopop, 2003)
™ and © Tokyopop

What’s not to like? Cute teen heroine, funny villains, entertaining adventures — this adaptation of the Disney Channel cartoon has it all.

Kim is a schoolgirl spy who must juggle saving the world (aided by sidekick Ron Stoppable) with school and cheerleading. What kind of stock does she come from? Well, her mom’s a brain surgeon and her dad’s a rocket scientist, if that tells you anything. And Drakken is a cartoon villain in more than one sense of the word.

The first volume adapts two episodes, “Bueno Nacho” and “Tick Tick Tick.” The look of the pages is exciting. The panels are unusually shaped, from skewed rectangles and kidney-bean shapes to jagged bursts and, in one instance, Swiss cheese slices. These panels are superimposed over establishment shots. So a scene occurring in school, for example, has a picture of the school in the background. It’s a clever and effective device.

The speech balloons are translucent, a technique that can make dialogue harder to read, but not in this case. Wisely, the balloons are more opaque than when most other comics employ this method.

If there is one flaw, minor though it may be, it is that some of the word balloons are too big for their panels. When the options are reducing font size or truncating dialogue, this is probably the lesser of the evils.

— Jack Abramowitz / Comics Buyer‘s Guide’s Reading Room
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