Creative Staff
Creators: Michael Dante DiMartino, Bryan Konietzko
Writer: Gene Luen Yang
Artist: Gurihiru
What They Say:
Avatar Aang travels to the spirit world to parley with an ancient power, bringing Fire Lord Zuko ever closer to discovering the truth about his mother’s fate – and his own past. Yet Zuko’s sister, Azula, is becoming increasingly dangerous, threatening to ruin everything that Zuko, Aang, Katara, and Sokka have struggled to achieve on their search! Written and drawn by the creative team behind the best-selling Avatar: The Promise, Gene Luen Yang and Gurihiru, in collaboration with Avatar: The Last Airbender and Legend of Korra creators Michael Dante DiMartino and Bryan Konietzko, this is the ultimate continuation of Avatar and the perfect companion to Legend of Korra!
Content: (please note that the content portion of a review may contain spoilers)
Despite Zuko and Azula’s fighting, Aang’s trip to the spirit world is successful in bringing the spirit of Forgetful Valley, the Mother of Faces, to the pool where the friends, and the brother and sister from the water tribe, wait. Anxious to finally figure out where Ursa is, the group is stunned when the Mother of Faces tells them she only grants one request at a time. Knowing that the brother and sister have been waiting for so long, they mean to let them ask for the brother’s new face… but Azula, who can’t unerstand compassion and selflessness, barges in and demands to know where Ursa is. It’s then we find out, through the spirit’s explanation and a set of flashbacks, that they’ve already met her as the wife of Noren from the village. She has changed her face and name to Noriko, and had her memory wiped of all the painful years with Ozai — including all of the time spent with her children.
While Zuko runs to stop an enraged Azula, Aang attempts to get the Mother of Faces to help the water tribe siblings, but she becomes furious that humans continue to ask her to undo the work that she did, and that now even the Avatar is demanding she help the humans. But as Aang deflects her attacks, the brother loses his mask, and it’s discovered that he wasn’t injured — his face was wiped away by Koh the Face Stealer, who happens to be the son of the Mother of Faces. Repentent, the spirit returns the man’s face. Meanwhile, Zuko manages to reach Noriko and Noren before Azula attacks. Realizing that Noren is also Ikem, the man his mother had loved, Zuko is prepared to remain in this village with who he sees as his true family, and Azula attacks. Zuko, knowing he has to take charge, fights her off, and Azula runs, leaving her family, and the letter saying Zuko is not the old Fire Lord’s son, behind.
With this conclusion, a lot of the twists from both previous volumes and the show finally make sense. Ursa never returned from her banishment because she had chosen to forget everything, a harsh decision that pained her as she made it, but one she needed to make at the time in order to move on and not cling to the things that would hurt her. The Mother of Faces does return Ursa’s memories and old face at the end of the volume, and we learn from her that the twist from volume one, that Zuko is really Ikem’s son, was actually a purposeful lie. Ursa only wanted to write something that would make Ozai angry enough that he would reveal his interception of her letters. This does make what seemed a dismantling of a part of the Avatar story go back to making sense again, but in a way it’s a let down as a big plot turn that’s suddenly made inconsequential. What’s not inconsequentail about it, though, is how this lie, though Ozai saw through it, caused him to act to Zuko. As punishment to Ursa, who admits that she wishes Zuko were not his son, he vows to follow her wishes and treat Zuko as if he does not belong to him. It explains all of Ozai’s treatment to Zuko, from his obvious disdain to the burn on his face, and reinforces how horrible Ozai was, that he would go to such lengths in order to punish his unhappy wife.
I had wondered, too, if Azula had really been receiving visions from Ursa all this time, but the fact that she had no memory of her chilren, and thus could not communicate with them even in a magical way, makes it clear that Azula is, very simply, completely unhinged, so desperate and jealous over the love she felt she never got. In the end, she runs off, and whether or not she’ll appear in a future story in order to reach a conclusion in her own story arc is unclear.
In Summary
It’s been a few years since Avatar first made fans ask the question, “What happened to Zuko’s mom?”, and with this volume we finally have the complete answer. As with much of what the show and comic series have done, it’s nothing like what I expected, and is still so satisfying. Part of me always assumed that Zuko would find that Ursa was dead, so that they’ll now be able to be together is a heartwarming relief. There is also a combination relief/disappointment at the revelation that the letter is a lie, as it allows the story to fall back into the right place but also has the potential to feel like a waste — unless you look at it not as part of the plot, but as part of the growth and definition of different characters. Again, the side story with the water tribe siblings gave the story more dimension than if it was just a straightforward search by the group, and even with the low page count the added plot doesn’t make anything feel cluttered or rushed. I was pleasantly surprised at the end to see that there is another in-between comic series on its way, this one thankfully featuring Toph after her conspicuous absence in The Search. Now that some of the character mysteries have been solved, maybe some of the blanks in the Avatar timeline can be filled in as well.
Grade: A
After regaining her memories, does Ursa mention Azula?
So in summary: Zuko really IS Ozai’s son, and Ursa tried to piss Ozai off by claiming he wasn’t Ozai decides to get back at Ursa by treating Zuko like crap.
So Zuko is the instrument for both parents to be nasty at each other, while in actuality he’s the one that gets all the crap form both sides.
Ursa DELIBERATELY forgot everything, thus ABANDONING Zuko to the disgusting fate she condemned him to with no hope of reparation! But not only did she abandon Zuko to a life of shame, neglect and abuse, she also left Azula, not the most stable of people, to cope with her psychological problems on her own.
Why? Because (I quote) “Ursa never returned from her banishment because she had chosen to forget everything, a harsh decision that pained her as she made it, but one she needed to make at the time in order to move on and not cling to the things that would hurt her”
So Ursa felt she ‘needed to move on’, and so abandoned both her children – one to insanity and one to disgrace and suffering.
“Knowing that the brother and sister have been waiting for so long, they mean to let them ask for the brother�s new face� but Azula, who can�t understand compassion and selflessness, barges in and demands to know where Ursa is”
They think they need more help than Azula does? You think Azula needs to see her mother LESS? If they really were selfless, they would let Azula ask! But of corse they don’t, those selfish uncommiserating bastards.
But really, Ursa turns out to be the real villain of Zuko’s entire life, condemning him to an awful life as an outcast just so she could see _if Ozai was reading her letters_.
The ‘Content’ subheader contains a spoiler warning, so I jumped to the next section, ‘Summary’ because it DIDN’T contain a warning. But that section has massive spoilers too! I just wanted to know if you thought it was good, not get the spoilers. Please edit that ‘Summary’ subheader to warn people that that section also contains spoilers. This comic is almost 2 months from its release date. This level of spoilers without proper warning is bad form.
How incredibly boring.
There is NO WAY Azula was just hallucinating that vision of Ursa, since it knew things Azula couldn’t possibly know (it flat-out hinted at Noriko being Ursa last volume by saying “You’re going the wrong way!” when they left the village). I think there’s some Spirit World stuff happening with Azula.
This is an interesting post. Ozai clearly pushed Ursa over the edge, but her actions towards her children are seriously questionable. I wonder if she treated Azula the way she did as a child because she recognized how much Ozai valued her skill? There’s really no good end for these two. A lifetime of therapy!
So does this just ignore the whole, Ursa assassinated Fire Lord Azulon and was banished for treason, to she left of her own volition because she couldn’t cope with her husband. This seems to change the character way too much and makes her a lot less sympathetic. Also it gives Ozai a motive to treat Zuko terribly. Personally I much preferred Ozai treating Zuko terribly because we thought he was weak and lack discipline, which relates to the culture of the Fire Nation. .
How do u noe can we have a link of the. Comic book
You forget she was trying to save Zuko’s life and was ordered to leave the palace by Ozai
Is there any last meeting between Zuko and Ozai? After this whole ordeal is gone?
You know, writing a scandalous letter about your own son to provoke your husband, whose unstable temper and emotions can be easily angered, is not the brightest of ideas.
Yeah……I’m going to wait until the Search 3 comes out before I buy this
Going to have to throw out the age old Internet demand of pics or it didn’t happen. If you really say you have the comic and you really say this is what happened then I want scans of the pages that make the huge change everything we’ve been told about the whole royal family of the Fire Nation reveals as proof.
Umm…I think I rather wait to read for myself what happens. You could be saying anything. I don’t see any scans posted as proof you have read Part 3.
Is this fake? It sounds fake considering that The Search part 3 is to be released in October and I haven’t seen any scans and stuff around.
Why are you lying? What could you possibly gain from this?
It’s not fake. Review sites often get advance looks at things like this.
We’re working off an advance review copy from Dark Horse, as we do for most of our Dark Horse reviews. We are prohibited by agreement from posting anything visual from within the book however.
Since 2008 the creators of Avatar revealed that Azula recieved visions because she felt her mother didn’t love her.
So basically the award for worst parent in the Avatar Universe goes to Ursa. She makes Yokone and Ozai look like Father’s of the Year. This chick abandons her children after favoring one and ignoring the other. Then she has her memory wiped of them so she wont feel bad about herself. But before that she makes up a lie about her son which makes his father treat him like crap for the rest of his life and could have had her son killed. She just chooses to forget the fact she left her children with a monster and runs off but it’s all okay because she did so she could be happy with the one she loves I mean who cares about Zuko and Azula and what happens to them, she’s with her dream man, she gets her happy ending. Fuck you Ursa you terrible person.
i wish they made a tv series around this
so the first 2 volumes were a waste of time…
Do you know the name of the next “in-between comic series” with Toph in it after the search part three??
I’m disappointed that Azula’s arc is left hanging. The first two books emphasized parallels and contrasts of brother-sister relationships deliberately insinuating that a resolution of the conflict between Zuko and Azula was forthcoming. For better or worse.
Not following through with that is a huge disappointment. They made their relationship as central to the story as finding their mother. This doesn’t feel like like a satisfying ending at all.
Heck, Iroh in the first installment pretty much said that the journey was as much about Azula finding peace as it was Zuko. What gives? The more I think about it, the worse it gets. It’s like the writers forgot everything they wrote before to just let Azula ‘run off’ at the end with her fate in doubt.
I hope the copy you read was incomplete somehow. That’s a huge thing to leave out.
She left out how Ursa responded to hearing Azula turned into “an unhinged & deeply disturbed child.”
It is called The Rift and it will be released on March 5th.
I agree with you mostly, but ummm, that brother and sister pair got there first, were waiting for years, and the brother lost his friggin face. Aang and the others made the right move.
Words cannot describe how i feel about it. This is exactly what I was thinking and you are 100% correct. I thought she was a selfless mother, that some tragedy made her unable to come back for zuko. Turns out she just abandoned both her kids (regardless of favoritism, I know she loved azula too) and pursued her own damn happiness. I think Azula is actually right on this one, blowing up and leaving this shit mother behind.
Avatar: The Last Airbender was the best anime I’ve ever seen. I watched the whole thing when it was actually airing on television, and I was a die-hard fan. Years later, I started to watch it again, and finished all 3 books in 2 days, because it was so good. I immediatly started re-watching it, and filling in the blanks into Legend of Korra. I also have read the other two Search comics, I hope this one is good.
Sure you do. Prove it or you are a liar.
Prove it by what, giving you the file for it? You realize that publishers send out advance digital files for review all the time. We work off of these regularly. Pretty much every site that does comics reviews of any note does that. Dark Horse sends out digital watermarked versions of trades months ahead of release every quarter. It’s just standard practice.
It’s not an anime. It was actually produced in the US. Quote from Wikipedia: “is an American animated television series…” It’s country of origin was the United States.
Regarding the point that Azula did not find peace by the end of Part 3, she actually did. This happens after Zuko tells Azula that he has and will always love her unconditionally because she is his sister. This is the first time in Azula’s life that someone tells her this. This realization struck home for Azula which made her give up on her goal of killing Ursa(who actually apologized to Azula for not loving her enough). Now that Azula knows that Zuko will always love her(and along with the fact that her mother apologized), she went off into the Forgetful Valley to find her true destiny. I honestly did not expect for Zuko being the one to help redeem Azula which makes it great. I sincerely hope we do get a comic series about Azula(or an episode series) and how she changes into a much better person. But, since she went off into the Forgetful Valley, will she find and ask the Mother of Faces to swap her identity? That’s something to talk about.
Well, the book’s out now and it turns out there IS a resolution to the conflict between Azula and Zuko (Zuko embraces that he will always care about Azula, and this makes Azula unable to continue fighting against him or their mother). It’s just Azula’s personal fate that is unresolved, but I’m sure it’ll be forthcoming in a future comic (the creators have already confirmed that the next Toph-centric trilogy will not be the end of the comic line.)
That’s because we never see Ursa’s response. Boo.
No, she hasn’t found peace yet at all, but this is clearly the START of her finding it. She couldn’t start looking for it until she gave up her evil goals, which she has now. And I definitely agree that Zuko redeeming her was great, since everyone expected Ursa to and Avatar is at it’s best when it subverts expectations.
Hell no, she’s an awful mother but worse than Ozai or Yakone? That’s overexaggeration.
These visions have been oddly specific, though, so I think the reviewer is wrong to say they’re just hallucinations meaning Azula is unhinged: I think they’re a product of Azula’s spirit trying to show her the right way, sort of like what Zuko suffered through in “The Earth King”.
Just once, in reiterating that she didn’t love Azula enough, which she already said when she was Noriko.
Wow… Just read part 3….. Waste of time and trees. I much prefer it if they would have let the air bender series die because the promise and the search just made it horrible. Nothing was really resolved for anyone but ursa and the water tribe siblings who I don’t care to remember. Azula was a fav character until now. I think I’ll just ignore future installments. Everyone is weak now. Thanks gene. Lol
I’d be more at ease with it being just that if the writer’s hadn’t pretty much set up our expectations for what was to become of Azula herself in the opening chapter by way of Iroh’s expressed hope for her.
One could argue there is some sense of her turning a corner with the leaving behind of the letter, and maybe that is something. I was hoping for a bit more closure, however, again, because of the setup offered in the first book.
In a sense, this is more of a tease for me than the unanswered fate of Zuko’s mom was at the end of the Last Airbender. I’ve been hoping for the fulfillment of her transformation into the person she should always have been since the last four episodes of the original series when we had the bombshell dropped on us of the background of her neurosis, and how deep her emotional issues were, even if they were based on a lie she told herself and chose to believe. It was enough that it made you hope for eventual reconciliation as far back as then. So to have to be told to wait longer for her resolution now even after the ‘further adventures’ have been told is… even more frustrating.
It’s less unsatisfying than I had feared given her decision to leave behind the note (and I agree with Aang that it was likely intentional, or at least a subconscious expression of a desire to move beyond her ambition for the throne), but it hasn’t crossed over into being completely satisfying territory yet either. As you say, there are more books to be written, and this story of hers needs to be resolved and should be told. Here’s hoping they’re listening to us, because I desperately want those scenes where she finally reconciles her past with her future, now more than before.
Hi. Just wanted to ask if this edition has notes/comments by Gurihiru and Gene Luen Yang on every other page? I’m not sure if that was something that only appeared in the library editions or on the paperback ones as well. 🙂
When the most powerful person in your life (and your country) is an abusive jerk, you don’t get a whole lot of choices. Ursa wrote that lie because she suspected that Ozai was intercepting her mail (being abusive and refusing to allow her contact with anyone outside the palace). This turned out to be true. She had absolutely no intention to hurt Zuko, and she had no way of knowing that Ozai would punish her further by taking it out on Zuko. Not all people who abuse their wives also abuse their children, but Ozai’s a special piece of work.
She certainly didn’t abandon her children. If she had stayed, Zuko would have died (because of Ozai’s insubordination). She really had no choice at that point, or rather, she had Sophie’s choice. There was no way Ozai would have allowed her to take Zuko or Azula with her. The best she could have done as a mother would be to watch them from afar, assuming Ozai wouldn’t change his mind at some point and just have her killed.
Now, if she had kept her memories, all she would have is the pain of her impossible situation. Maybe she could have joined Zuko on his quest later on, but Ozai would still be a threat. Changing her face was a must to protect herself from spies and assassins. Losing her memories…that was not a motherly thing to do at all. But a child who cares about their mother’s welfare would come to understand why she did it. Zuko did.
(I totally agree that Ursa was a poor mother to Azula. She even apologized for it, and now there is some chance they can make amends)
She didn’t leave “because she couldn’t cope with her husband”, she killed Azulon because Azulon had ordered Zuko’s assassination! She left because Ozai (now the most powerful guy in the most powerful nation on earth, literally) ordered her to do so. She’s not as sympathetic, but I never saw her as wholly the victim because she favored Zuko to begin with. This just adds more shades of grey to her character.
How is a person supposed to know how an abusive psychopath will react to any action they take? Abusers will use any excuse to justify treating others like crap. Maybe she shouldn’t have written the letter, but Ozai’s overreaction could have been caused by any number of other factors. He could have decided to treat Zuko like garbage because he didn’t like her “attitude” or something.
She FORGOT HER CHILDREN SO SHE COULD LIVE BETTER. WHat’s worse is that she choose to remember her boyfriend. Her BOYFRIEND over her own flesh and blood. Don’t give me that “She would have never been able to live happily ever after” Well guess what neither would her kids. They would always miss their mother both of them did. But Ursa no she didn’t want to miss her kids. She wanted her happily ever after. She gave up on them. She didn’t care to wonder about them in quiet moments. she didn’t care to remember their faces or their smiles. Did Zuko just up and forget his mother after he got the throne? NO because he loved. Hell Ikem didn’t forget Ursa when he got a new face. He wanted to remember all the times they shared despite the hurt. He had NO REASON to even think of seeing Ursa again but he decided to keep her memory with him and BOOM look what happened a miracle they were reunited. Ursa only thought of herself and her pain. Not about her kids pain. She didn’t want to remember her children’s pain or their laugh or their smile. The first time they walked or spoke. She wanted her happiness above her children. And Taht’s what makes her a horrible parent. What kind of mother forgets their children?
Then why make the situation even worse? By opening wishing for Zuko to be some else’s son in front of the father, you’re just begging for bad things to happen to Zuko. Regardless of Ursa’s sympathies, it is still a poorly-made decision on her part that gives Ozai plenty of easy and obvious excuses to hate Zuko. And thus she bears a great deal of responsibility for Zuko’s suffering, which something I like from this because it shows that Ursa’s not some poor innocent victim that the Search Part II portrayed and she has much faults for the family’s dysfunctional state.