Airspeed Prime here to bring you the latest news on the upcoming graphic novels from Dark Horse, The Promise Part 1 (Released 25th January 2012). I will do so in the order it came in, to give an idea of how think and fast it did this past week, and how went from knowing a bit about the comic to a ton of new info. [caption id="attachment_4385" align="aligncenter" width="300" caption="With a release Date of January 25th 2012, The Promise Part 1 will be the continuation of ATLA."]

[/caption] The first thing to mention is that Gene Luen Yang, the writer, did a presentation at San Francisco Library about comics where he mentioned he would be talking about The Promise. The contents at first were not put online, but some fans emailed Gene Yang about the Avatar content and he replied here, http://avatar.wikia.com/wiki/User_blog:Uiop60/Email_from_Gene_Yang The content at this presentation included

Zuko with a mullet, which was later changed
Thumbnail sketches and final art for a page of the novel
Comparison shot between the characters as they look in 321 compared to a year later in here.
Information about the format of the story of the book, the first few pages of the book are set immediately after the end of 321 including: The second half Zuko and Ozai's conversation about Ursa, and the aftermath of Aang and Katara's kiss in Ba Sing Se.

He said he would contact Dark Horse to see if he could post these images online and he got the go ahead, below is the post about the presentation. All of the images are in the youtube video Gene Yang made, so check out this video / post. http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=7H2E6uKvBDY#! http://geneyang.com/atla-behind-the-scenes I this post is the youtube video where Gene Yang himself talks in depth about making The Promise. The second news story about The Promise Part 1 is that one fan got an advanced copy of the book and posted a few details and panels from the book online. The person is http://royally.tumblr.com/. You can also check out a review of the promise by Slytherclaw here The first image we got was this panel from a year on in the book with Zuko and Katara [caption id="attachment_4576" align="aligncenter" width="500" caption="Zuko and Katara in the Promise, the context is that Katara started a fight and Zuko is stopping her."]

[/caption] With this the person mentioned that Aang and Katara a year on are boyfriend and girlfriend and call each other "sweetie", Awwww :) Then this image was posted [caption id="attachment_4577" align="aligncenter" width="500" caption="An image from the start of the book, immediately after THAT KISS. Sokka's reaction is perfect."]

[/caption] and along with this the person gave us a description of the main plot as well as some info on Zuko's hair.

-Zuko's hair is usually his long, wavy boyband style. This is just a couple of panels where he's in full blown Fire Lord attireI feel like I picked a bad panel! Zuko normally looks much younger throughout the comic, the full blown Fire Lord attire and hairstyle definitely makes him older. However with his boyband wavy hair and Ã¢â‚¬Ëœnormal' season 3 attire, he looks a lot more like his 18 years. A bit of a spoiler, but the main plot revolves around Zuko, Aang and Kuei working together to try to rid the Earth Kingdom of the Fire Nation colonies. A lot of the tension actually happens between Aang and Zuko, if that makes it any more intriguing for you. And yes, Zuko does get backlash from the Fire Nation families who are in the colonies, absolutely."

So there you go guys, the info is really coming thick and fast in relation to the comics. Just over 2 months until Part 1 and once that is out we get a great stream of Avatar content

The Promise part 1 January 25th 2012
The Promise Part 2 May 2012
The Promise Part 3 July/August 2012
The Last Airbender Legend Of Korra Mid/Late 2012

[caption id="attachment_4584" align="aligncenter" width="534" caption="The covers of Part 1, 2 and 3 in Full, pencils and thumbnails respectively."]

[/caption] [caption id="attachment_4585" align="aligncenter" width="378" caption="The Promise Part 2 Cover"]

[/caption] Last but not least, making all of the above info feel like nothing, the Preview went up on Amazon for the book and they made a rather large mistake of pretty much showing off most of the book through the surprise me button, it was soon fixed so only a select few images can be seen. We have decided only to post a few here and link to the rest just because I know a lot of people really care about Spoilers. We know know stuff like the exact plot and what "The Promise" is and so many returning characters. Preview of Comic is available here [caption id="attachment_4582" align="aligncenter" width="500" caption="Here is a panel of Toph at her Metalbending school."]

[/caption] [caption id="attachment_4583" align="aligncenter" width="381" caption="The return of Sneers, and we get to see Smellerbee and LongShot again,"]

[/caption] So I will finish this news update post by giving my thoughts on the 30 or so pages I have seen. My opinion on the quality of the book is that this is truly the Book 4 of the show, everything feels EXACTLY like in the show. This is Avatar at it's best, it works just as well in comic form as it does in the show. I will not talk about spoilers but I have to say this book does have an incredibly interesting and dark plot. Thank you for reading, keep an eye on the site for more Avatar news.

Tenzin Blows A Fuse