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Maximum Ride

First appearance: 
August 2008
Status: 
Active

A ragtag group of young people are living in a remote house in the woods in peace - until savage man-beasts called Erasers attack and kidnap Angel, the youngest. Now the rest of them set out to rescue Angel, but they all have a supernatural secret of their own - they have feathery, angel-like wings on which they can fly. Can Max and her friends rescue Angel? And what do the Erasers have to do with the frightening lab from which they had previously escaped?

Maximum Ride is based on the best-selling series of novels by American author James Patterson and gorgeously illustrated by NaRae Lee. It is unclear how much influence Patterson has on Maximum Ride’s comic form, if any; I tend to suspect his name is associated with the project merely to lend it authenticity, but the actual script of the comic is the interpretation of Lee and/or unnamed assistants. This is just my hunch, though.

Max Ride takes a single-issue break in the February 2009 issue, but it continues in the March issue. Unfortunately, the pages that would have appeared in the February issue will not be published; you’ll have to pick up Volume 1 of the Max Ride collection in order to see what happens (more info below). The stated reason for this was to give artist Lee a break; as Lee often jokes on her bonus pages about missing deadlines, I can’t help but wonder if maybe she was falling behind in her work and needed a month to catch up, but that’s just speculation. Lee also takes a break for the November 2009 issue; however, this time, there are no skipped pages.

I was skeptical of Maximum Ride, just as I am skeptical of best-selling “pop novels” of the sort Patterson writes - they tend to feel formulaic, as if they’re written especially to sell a bajillion copies. And though I’ve never read the novels, I must say that as a comic, Maximum Ride works - it has a suspenseful plot brought to life by Lee’s endearing character designs.

NaRae Lee is the illustrator of Maximum Ride. A young and talented illustrator, she started working as a freelancer for a publisher at age fifteen. The March 2009 issue features a lengthy interview with NaRae.

Despite the fact that Maximum Ride is being distributed only in English, NaRae Lee resides in Korea and admits, in her own (translated) words, she doesn’t speak a word of English; in the November 2008 issue, she mentioned on her bonus page that she was completely unable to read the very comics she had drawn in the issues of Yen Plus that were sent to her. In her March 2009 interview, when asked her thoughts about the fact that her work is being released outside of Korea first, she says “It doesn’t feel real yet… My friends who are studying in the States or in Canada often tell me that they’ve seen the magazine, but it still feels like someone else’s story.” (This brings up some interesting questions; does she pen in the dialogue in Korean, just to have it be translated to English for when it’s printed back in the States?)

She often jokes about her inability to make deadlines. In the November 2008 issue, she included a drawing of Alex and her Astral from Nightschool. Nightschool’s Svetlana Chmakova in response drew a picture of Maximum Ride’s Max and Angel for the December 2008 issue. When writing the romanized version of her name, she often writes her given name as “NaRe,” omitting the second A.