I remember where I was when Princess Diana died. My parents and I were on vacation in San Francisco and I’ll forever associate the city with sitting around our hotel television listening to the shocking news of Diana’s death. At 9 years old, I didn’t understand why my mother my friends’ mothers were so upset. Nor did I understand the fervor around Prince William’s marriage to Kate Middleton a few years ago. They all seemed like perfectly nice people, but why should Americans care about the British royal family?
And then Meghan Markle started dating Prince Harry.
As a celebrity obsessive who worked at Us Weekly in its Janice Min heyday, I couldn’t imagine a juicier story than Markle’s transformation from the kind of B-list actress who stars in crappy Hallmark movies to someone who gets Lifetime movies made about them. Her and Harry’s story is nothing short of a modern-day fairytale. It’s frustrating, then, that TidalWave Productions’ The Royals: Prince Harry & Meghan Markle, a special collectors comic commemorating the couple’s upcoming nuptials, totally saps the magic from their story.
Written by Michael L. Frizell (whose credits mostly consist of real-life to comic special issues), the issue seems to misunderstand what makes Harry and Meghan’s story so compelling. This manifests in two ways. First, in Frizell’s deep lack of understanding about Hollywood celebrity. He genuinely seems to think playing “sexy FedEx girl” in Horrible Bosses for 30 seconds is a sign Markle’s career was on the rise rather than the kind of crushingly irrelevant bit part that makes truly successful stars cringe.
The second way he (and perhaps the imprint itself) misunderstands the appeal in Harry and Meghan’s courtship is that the couple doesn’t appear together until the issue’s final three pages.
In theory, anyone buying this extra special issue already knows Harry and Meghan’s histories as individuals, the appeal is the way this unlikely couple decided to spend their lives together. Sure, you could argue that the issue is meant to be a collector’s item for future generations to understand the story, but the issue itself is so shoddily made, any copies will be lucky to survive—let alone be purchased in the first place.
If TidalWave Productions really wanted to make a special edition comic worthy of its $6.99 price, they would have bothered to edit it. The issue is filled with spelling and factual errors. Take the panel which claims Diana and Charles married in 2981 instead of 1981. Or the panel that somehow replaces “took their toll” with “to their toll.”
Even more embarrassing is the moment when Frizell conflates Markle’s time working at the U.S. embassy in Argentina and her time as a briefcase girl on Deal or No Deal, falsely stating that she was a briefcase girl in the Argentinian version of the show. It’s a bizarre and embarrassing mix-up that only adds to the feeling that TidalWave is exploiting people’s excitement about the royal wedding with little concern for creating a quality product. Still, those flaws wouldn’t be quite so insulting if the art could distract from it.
Though the Royals line usually features the kinds of artists whose eye contact you avoid while walking past their tables at cons, the art in Royals: Prince Harry and Meghan Markle isn’t all terrible. Artist Justin Currie draws and colors much of the issue’s first third and his pages are the highlight. He often draws dark character silhouettes against colorful backgrounds and the results are really striking. No, his version of Prince Harry doesn’t look exactly like the genuine article except for his stark red hair, but at least Currie shows a sense of style.
The same cannot be said for the other artists, Pablo Martinena and Joe Phillips. They clearly base their drawings on photo reference, so, it’s baffling then that their work ends up feeling lifeless and amateurish compared to Currie. While Phillips’s splash pages are passable except for the uncanny valley vibes they give off, Martinena’s work is plain bad. He draws the section on Markle and his first image of her clad in a cerulean dress while walking the red carpet is a true disaster. He can’t seem to capture either the proportions of her face nor those of any human being. In one panel, there is a human figure so hideous that after days of staring at it, I still can’t figure out who or what it is. Is it an underprivileged person young Meghan helps on one of her and her mother’s volunteering trips to Jamaica or is it Meghan as a burn victim? We’ll never know.
Still, as awful as some of the original art is, nothing is more egregious than the panels that feature recycled art from previous special issues. Perhaps the worst is the splash page of Princess Diana near the beginning. Though the image does resemble her, it also looks like a degraded photocopy, with heavy, inelegant lines that make her features look heavy rather than delicate. Moreover, the constant switching between artists is disorienting for the reader and reveals the issue for what it really is: a shameless money-grab by a company that doesn’t care about its craft or its subjects.
The Royals: Prince Harry and Meghan Markle is easily one of the worst comic issues I’ve ever read. The only reason it’s not the worst is because I also read the Princess Diana tribute. However, it also taught me that Meghan Markle did the calligraphy on Robin Thicke and Paula Patton’s wedding invitations and I will forever be grateful. Even so, the issue mostly rehashes information we already know and aside from Currie’s pages, it doesn’t do it in a particularly compelling way. Add to that the nonexistent editing/fact-checking and the recycled art and this special edition comic feels like a piss poor way to commemorate the upcoming royal wedding. The only way to enjoy the issue is to hate-read it in the way people used to watch NBC’s SMASH. From that perspective, The Royals: Prince Harry and Meghan Markle may just be the best comic ever made.
Rating: 3/10
