Awesome / Avatar The Last Airbender Comics

aka: Avatar The Last Airbender The Search

Awesome moments from The Promise, The Search, Rebound, The Rift, Smoke and Shadow and other comic adaptations for Avatar: The Last Airbender

---

The Promise

• Toph is all kinds of awesome in this comic. Here's why:
  • She launches herself into the air with Earthbending and makes a perfect landing on Appa's back as he flies overhead. Keep in mind Appa was probably miles above her and she had no way of knowing where he was except for sound.
  • When the Earth Kingdom rioters outside of Yu Dao throw a rock at Sokka as he tries to calm everyone down, Toph then shuts everyone up by announcing herself as the greatest earthbender in the world and threatens to smash the next person who speaks up with a boulder.
  • She uses Earthbending in mid air a long way above the ground to precisely let her and Sokka slide down. She determined the altitude using her sense of smell to identify the location of the trees near her dojo.
  • She makes a monstrous looking Mini-Mecha by remodeling Fire Nation armor and powered by Metalbending despite the fact that she can't see. Special credit to Sokka for somehow communicating the design through to the blind girl. Seriously, this girl really is the greatest earthbender in the world.
• Katara is no slouch, either. Here are the reasons:
  • When Aang confronts Fire Lord Zuko, his personal guard attack him, setting his cloak on fire. This causes Katara to snap like a twig, nailing all five of them in less time than it takes to scream, "STOP TRYING TO SET MY BOYFRIEND ON FIRE!" She grabs water from a fountain, and throws it at two firebenders who get iced at once; throw water from her hip flask at two fleeing firebenders who get their feet frozen to ground, and throws a snowball at a firebender sending him to the ground in one hit. Even Aang's impressed because she did it without spilling a single drop of blood - with a side of, "a girl who can do THAT lets me snuggle with her" aka "WHOA."
  • How much her waterbending has improved even further since Sozin's comet. She can make floating staircases and even use water like a flying carpet for crossing chasms. It's not so much as her ability as much as the effortless ease with which she does it — it goes almost unnoticed.
  • Katara uses The Power of Love to break what was seconds from becoming a Vicious Cycle of Could Have Avoided This Plots. Aang is angsting over having to kill Zuko to fulfill the titular Promise and restore the balance by separating the Nations once more, when Katara points out that if the nations have to be separate, how can the two of them build a life together? She doesn't even say it as any kind of threat, just as an observation, because she wants peace more than anything. Thus The United Republic Of Nations is born. Bravo, Katara Water Tribe. Bravo.
  • When Katara insists that Earth King Kuei get out of his hot air balloon and face "the people who have to live with [his] decisions", and he protests with "But it's not safe down there!". She holds out her hand and says "No. It's not." BAMF.
• Protesters attack Sokka for being a "Water Tribe Savage" and then make fun of him for only having a boomerang. He shuts them up quickly with a simple flick of his signature weapon.
• Toph's students figuring out how to Metalbend literally overnight with nothing more than self confidence and then going badass by shooting the daylights out of the rival Firebender students, and their teacher.
• Though it has negative consequences, Earth King Kuei finally taking a level in badass and declaring that he will send his army to enforce Harmony Restoration.
• The final page of volume 3 and the entire story: AZULA'S BACK.
• It's really neat to see how much Aang matures and develops his own convictions over the course of The Promise. He's forced to grow up pretty fast in the original series, too, but it's mostly about him fulfilling his predetermined destiny. At the end of the original series, he's conflicted about his past lives pushing him toward killing the Firelord, but manages to get around it by taking a third option. By the end of The Promise, he's become much more confident in his own worldview, standing up to Avatar Roku (even going so far as to cut off contact with him) over his refusal to consider changing world needs.

The Search

• Azula is in fine form:
  • She tricks Ty-Lee into chi-blocking her, so that she can later use the temporary flexibility from being chi-blocked to slip an arm out of her straightjacket and escape Zuko. She then charges off to find Ursa's letters that Ozai told her about, forcing Zuko to take her, unbound, on his search for Ursa.
  • She loudly announces to the Gaang that she's escaping, then does so. By jumping off Appa. While he's flying thousands of feet in the air. Normally, announcing your plans to your enemies would be silly, but for Azula, it's part of the plan. She knows Aang will follow her and catch her. She quickly turns the tables on him, using him to make a more controlled descent, and then promptly escapes in the confusion. And the only reason she didn't fully escape is because Sanity Has Advantages.
  • When the Gaang's being attacked by swarming moths, she fires off a ball of lightning that attracts them all away, having only had seconds to think it up. Proof that you can still be a The Chessmaster even while being completely insane. It's amazing how her bending has actually improved despite the time she's spent in a straitjacket in the institution. Specifically how much control she has over her lightning.
  • Though there are still some signs of her fighting skills being rusty, as she pretty much gets owned by the Gaang/Zuko in fights here much more easily than she did in the show.
• When Fire Lord Azulon takes Ursa away to be his son's bride, her Unlucky Childhood Friend Ikem confronts them with nothing but a wooden stage sword. Azulon's guards scoff at his pathetic weapon but then he tricks them into lighting his wooden sword on fire and throws it at them. Though he fails to stop them from taking Ursa away, it's still a pretty cool moment.
• The wolf spirit itself. It's as powerful as the benders, and it can fight well against Appa. When it's in a corner, it spits out moth wasps, rendering Sokka's arm useless and causing Katara to cough for the rest of the fight.
  • Appa bravely fights this wolf.
    • Screw bravely fighting. Appa was demolishing the Spirit in an absolutely one-sided almost literal Curb-Stomp Battle that Aang was begging Appa not to hurt it.
• Katara singlehandedly fending off a bunch of angry vines.
• It's a small one, but it must've taken courage and integrity for Noren to encourage Zuko to tell Noriko/Ursa the truth, even if it meant losing her.
• Sokka finally gets to use his boomerang against Azula, with the same trick he used against Zuko in the pilot, no less.
  • The fact that Sokka is now able to fight evenly with Azula by himself. Even if he couldn't outright defeat her on his own, she wasn't able to beat him either.
• A bit for Noriko, who despite not knowing what's even going on, apologizes to Azula for "not loving [her] enough". It's not every parent who has the maturity or compassion to accept accountability for how their child turned out, and it seems doing so has started to influence Azula for the better. Later, she doesn't hesitate to accept the Mother of Faces offer to return her memories, even knowing they would be painful, if only for Zuko and Azula's sake.
• The fact that Iroh, after having been robbed of his birthright by Ozai, is named interim Fire Lord by Zuko while he searches for Ursa. It may just be a temporary position, but being the Cool Old Guy he is we know that Zuko has found the right man to watch over his nation while he is away, and Iroh finally earns the privilege of experiencing what was rightfully his in his younger years.
• Zuko is in fine form as well:
  • Successfully redirecting Azula's lightning—twice.
  • His speech to her that is both awesome and heartwarming, and actually gets through to her enough for her to back off and give up on the goals she's obsessed over all story.
  • Crosses with a Heartwarming moment; but Zuko finally finds his mother!

Rebound

• When Mai's father finds out about his daughter and Zuko's breakup, he tries to recruit her into a faction that swears loyalty to the de-throned Ozai and hatred to Zuko. While Mai was coping with the breakup (with she voluntarily did when she discovered Zuko was having secret meetings with Ozai), she knows this is wrong and single-handedly disarms the entire faction with her brother Tom-Tom on her back.

The Rift

• The end of Part Two sees Toph preventing a cave-in after an errant arrow causes the unstable iron mine to totally collapse. That's Toph, a single earth/metalbender, holding up hundreds, nay, thousands of pounds of dirt, rock and iron ore, by herself to protect a large group of people. Overlaps with heartwarming when come Part Three, her dad, seeing how much she's tiring and believing that they may soon die as result, apologizes for his actions and words, telling her that he does love her. The realization that her dad really does care prompts not just a Heroic Second Wind, but a proud Badass Boast where she confidently tells him that he still doesn't understand who she is if he truly believes that she'll cave under the pressure.
• How does Aang match the sheer size of the General? By making a sort of "Humongous Mecha" golem of boulders, with him in an air sphere for its "head". It's not quite enough to match the metal armor that Old Iron has, but with Toph and her metalbender students handling that, he can put up a fight.

Smoke and Shadow

• Kiyi has bending powers! No surprise when one considers that like Zuko and Azula, she's descended from Avatar Roku.
• After the events of "The Search", Ursa finally tells off an imprisoned, powerless, bender-less Ozai! This is the man who isolated her from her parents, abused her, tormented their son (as a way to spite her), twisted Azula into a psychopath, banished her from ever seeing her children again, not to mention he eventually scarred Zuko. And when he so arrogantly tries to boss her around while sitting in his prison cell, Ursa finally sums up who Ozai really is! Rather than calling him a monster, which would be more of a compliment in Ozai's eyes, she instead breaks down Ozai as an insecure, little man with a big ego and small heart that couldn't even love himself. The cherry on top is that it gives her the closure to (literally and metaphorically) walk away from him without ever looking back!
  Ursa: (sternly) After all these years, I finally see you, Ozai. You're just a small, small man trying with all your might to be big. Your heart is so small, you've no room for your son, or your daughter, or your brother... or even yourself. Goodbye, Ozai.
  • Ozai's reaction to all of this is one of shock, disbelief and desperation. If one were to consider about his status as The Un-Favourite to Azulon, this speech hurts him more than anything that Zuko or Aang threw at him during the series.
  • Fridge-Awesome: Out of context, this seems to be a simple case of the elegant but traumatized Ursa finding her spine. But the sobering thing is, once upon a time, she used to be a fierce spitfire who was quite the tomboy in her youth. The forced marriage to Ozai turned her into a facsimile of that girl. By standing up to Ozai and talking him down, one could very well imagine Ursa has regained her dignity and become the brave young woman she once was.

Others

• "Bumi vs. Toph, Round One": They had a match for the title of World's Best Earthbender, and it ended in a draw. Toph pulled a tie with a White Lotus Grand Master.
  • The only reason it was a draw was because they were interrupted.