After having heard a little buzz and seeing the trailers for Shaolin Soccer, I was good and ready for a weird, funny and action-packed comic from Comicsone. Unfortunately, what I've got is something that shows glimmers of something really cool but suffers from terrible storytelling, resulting in a jumbled and almost unreadable mess. I love the characters in this story, when I can figure out who's who, but the plotting and the action leaves a lot to be desired, Given that the kung fu soccer sequences are a huge part of the appeal of Shaolin Soccer, this makes for a disappointing read more often than not. This creative team has a time-honored sports formula to work from here, and a hilariously fun high concept, but they (excuse the pun) drop the ball.
Shaolin Soccer isn't a complete loss. Though the storytelling is often weak in the action segments, there is some interesting character interplay. There's a lot of humor in these pages, including the "auto mechanic" dropping his cheating implements of destruction and trying to play it off and the first meeting between Sing and the girl making buns with Tai Chi, and the script definitely gets the charm of these characters across. You can really feel Sing's earnest, naive desires to make Shaolin popular in his words and actions, and the contrast between Sing's enthusiasm and the burned out despair of his brothers makes for a nice conflict.
It also makes for a potentially strong scene when, in what looks like his darkest moment, Sing's brothers come back to him to help him fulfill his dream. As with so many of the moments in this book, though, it's spoiled by confusing storytelling, overly blurred by speed lines and swirls of color with key contextual elements left out of the panel altogether. If these were the storyboards for the film, instead of a comic-book version of it, I'd say that it looked like the cinematographer were practicing Drunken Master Kung Fu instead of Shaolin while they were shooting the film. As is, I'll just say that the storytelling on the whole is clumsy, cluttered and mostly fails at the basic clarity that is necessary for storytelling.
What really kills me is that the action is such a mess, because there are some really neat ideas here and potentially fun scenes. Sing's demonstration of kung-fu by kicking a can into orbit or playing a "friendly game of soccer" with some bullies strike me as fun, kinetic action sequences that, with the artwork, are barely even coherent. Close-ups on eyes, blurred feet, streaks of color or motionless soccer balls substitute for cool choreography, speed lines that indicate specific motion and showing both action and consequences. It's a blur of random motion, like watching a fight sequence with a strobe light and every third frame cut out of the tape.
The creators bring the sense of humor to this book with the abusive taunts of the soccer hooligans or the unbelievably enthusiastic and optimistic personality of Sing, but they can't marry that sense of humor to a strong sense of storytelling, and the result is a book that is choppy and unclear. The trailer for the film is a series of scenes cut up and used with voice-over and music, and it tells the tale more effectively than this volume, which should theoretically be the intro for new readers. I'm not sure whether this is a cautionary tale of creating by committee (there are 10 names on the creative masthead, not counting the four editors) or just the more mundane failure to live up to such interesting potential, but at any rate, Shaolin Soccer is a huge disappointment.
