Broken Frontier

Fame: Taylor Swift had some memorable images, and the art was amazingly fitting for the early portions of her life, as it did a really good job of creating a nostalgic feel.  The writing and art were great in the beginning, during Swift’s early childhood, as it was a personal look, touching on family, disappointments, failures, and successes, but as the fame kicked in, the comic got extremely superficial.  It read more like a tabloid and a resumé than a biography.
 
The storytelling was well executed throughout, but, again, it is not very encompassing.  Readers are not given many details about Taylor Swift’s life, or the process by which she rose to fame.  That entire story is pretty much told in Bluewater’s press release.  It’s nothing really deep, and doesn’t captivate.  This comic just touches on the broad events, but it could’ve been so much more if it included any scenes, instead of snapshots.

The art did more for the story than the writing did.  The reader could easily figure out the events of each scene by just looking at the art.  The writing felt unnecessary, which could be a good or a bad thing, depending on how you look at it.  Personally, I believe that a good comic has these two aspects in balance.  It’s been said that the magic of comics is what happens between the panels, but there’s not exactly a huge emphasis on sequential storytelling in this book.  It relies heavily on using single panels to cover a long period of time.  This makes it necessary for both the words and the pictures to be uncomfortably descriptive.
 
In addition, the tone and rhythm of the writing gives the impression that the writers are either friends or devoted fans, as the comic feels like a puff-piece.  There’s not a lot of substance, just a lot of praise and heartwarming statements.  It touches on a lot of milestones, but is told out of order, and doesn’t seem to make any effort to really tell a story.  To be fair, it is a whole life, especially a famous musician’s life, so no one would expect it to fit in a comic book, but it is very superficial.  It doesn’t seem like a fair representation of Swift’s life.
 
This comic is only for people who would like more images of Taylor Swift in their homes or die-hard fans that need to get their hands on all Taylor Swift merchandise.  It contains nothing, I suspect, that couldn’t be found on Wikipedia.  The artist, Erick Adrian Marquez, is actually very talented in some respects.  What he lacks in solid forms he makes up in spectacular storytelling and design.  He captures the general image of the singing sensation, but the images could be rendered a little better, and his colors could be a little more vibrant.  A friend commented on how Taylor Swift loves to wear sparkling and eye-catching colors, and the comic doesn’t capture that.