comickal: recently read, heroines at large edition

[iainpj]

100 Girls (Adam Gallardo, Todd Demong; Simon and Schuster/Simon Pulse)

Sylvia seems to be your average teenaged girl, having your average teenaged girl problems. Her adoptive parents don't seem to understand her, she's having problems with the popular girl at school thinking she's poaching her boyfriend, she's having bad dreams about dozens of girls in these big incubation chambers -- you know, the usual. Only it turns out that she's got freaky super strength, so she accidentally flings the popular girl across the hall and then breaks her arm with her bare hands when she attacks Sylvia again. And it turns out that she was one of the girls in the incubation chambers, and was cloned from the tissue of various scientists involved. Because the government -- or someone -- is demanding results of the project, the people who created her suddenly want her back. She was stolen from the project by scientists who disagreed with what the project was for, which was to turn teenaged girls into weapons with superhero/villain-type powers through the use of Mad Science. (They'd already tried with boys, and with a very few exceptions, it doesn't seem to have worked.) Sylvia doesn't want to go back, and lets the bad guys know this with Extreme Violence. She then seeks out the other few girls who were taken out of the project, trying to stay one step ahead of the bad guys.

I call them bad guys, but the fact is, the mad scientists are drawn up as surprisingly complete characters. They have feelings for each other as well as the girls they've created, and that some of them have taken away from the project. You don't really understand why they're doing this -- even a moment's thought should have told them why this would be a terrible idea, adolescent rebellion to the extreme not withstanding, and Sylvia's extra little ability (you'll know it when you see it) is both understandable from a battlefield viewpoint, and terribly terribly misguided -- but that aside, both the girls and the scientists are very well developed. There are also people of various visible ethnic backgrounds who are involved in the project, as well as in trying to rescue some of the girls, which is a nice touch. (And mildly confusing at first; it's not until they explain that Sylvia seems to have been adopted as a teenager that it makes even vague sense that her adoptive parents are black.)

It's a very good, entertaining book, with interesting characters and artwork that's just cartoony enough to keep the violence from being too offputting. And make no mistake: when I say there's Extreme Violence, I mean there's a good bit of barehanded killing, killing through explosions, some interesting dismemberments, a bit of torture that we thankfully don't get to see ... really, it's pretty much all there. Depending on how you define things -- and allowing that every single thing she does, until the very end, is clearly in self defense -- Sylvia might be considered one of the biggest mass murderers in the country's history. All that violence does bring up the question of who, precisely, the audience of this book is. Mind, the question only comes up because of a certain cultural sexism. You've got a book meant primarily for boys in which a teenaged boy kills and maims and dismembers in a slightly cartoony way, no problem. But allegedly, boys don't read books with girls as the principal characters, which means that this would be aimed at girls, and people's biases change in interesting ways regarding girls and violence.

According to an interview I read elsewhere, Gallardo and Demong hope to continue the title, which was originally published through Arcana. I hope they get the chance. Any road, it's a very interesting story. Recommended.

Rapunzel's Revenge (Shannon and Dean Hale/Nathan Hale; Bloomsbury)

Once upon a time, there was a girl. Her parents wound up selling her to the wicked witch after they stole some lettuce from the witch's garden. The girl was brought up in ignorance of that fact, until she found out about the realities of her world. And then she decided to do something about that.

The Hales recast Rapunzel as a fairy tale of the old west. Evil witch Gothel has some sort of magic that makes things grow very fast, but it also sucks the life out of other areas, which means that much of the kingdom she reigns over is dead and sere. Rapunzel is raised inside the castle, and knows nothing of this. One day she gets very curious about what's outside the castle, and eventually gets around her mother's proscriptions, and takes a look, only to discover an enslaved, blighted world beyond the walls. She also accidentally finds the mother who gave birth to her, a slave in Gothel's mines. Needless to say, her view of things is changed dramatically. Furious that Rapunzel has disobeyed her, Gothel takes her to the forest and shuts her up, not in a tower, but in a very tall tree, with a hollow space near the top. Gothel uses the forest as defense of sorts, and causes things in it to grow very fast, including as it turns out, Rapunzel's hair and nails. Rapunzel refuses to give in to Gothel's demands to apologize and go back, so eventually Gothel abandons her, and causes the tree-prison to start growing closed. Rapunzel uses her now-lengthy hair and the rope tricks taught to her by one of the guards when she was a child, and escapes from the tree, and then has a raft of adventures in her attempt to free her real mother. Along the way, she runs into the prince who has come to rescue the maiden from her high prison -- only not so much, really. And then she meets Jack, of beanstalk and giantkiller and other fame; he's clearly meant as a sort of Jack portmanteau-trickster archetype, much as Jack of Fables.

Characterization in this story works in really pretty typical fairytale ways, setting aside. Rapunzel is a spunky young woman who rescues herself through most of the story, and rescues Jack a few times. The villains of the story are very very villainous, including Gothel, who seems to regard Rapunzel more as a possession to be subdued, rather than a daughter to be cared for. Nathan Hale's art is very expressive and fun to look at.

Very technically, Rapunzel's Revenge is sort of an all-ages book. More practically, it's the sort of thing you give to kids who are just old enough to read comfortably on their own. I don't think teenaged girls would like it -- or would admit to liking it -- which is a bit of a pity, since it really does show a teenaged girl being both very thoughtrul and very competent physically in ways that aren't often depicted. Recommended.

Air #1, "Letters from Lost Countries, part 1" (G. Willow Wilson/M.K. Perker; DC/Vertigo):

We meet Blythe, a flight attendant for a Dutch airline, as she and some guy are falling through the air out of a plane crashing into the ocean. We then jump back in time to when Blythe first meets this guy, having what appears to be a charmingly racist moment of terrorist neurosis about him -- he's from somewhere Mediterranean or Middle Eastern or somewhere (it's very very confusing) -- and then running into a charmingly racist/nationalist group that wants to take advantage of her feelings. Then, in a wildly improbable way, she gets talked into taking a travel bag for one of those guys. She gets talked into looking into the bag by That Guy -- he's now apparently a Spaniard, so he says -- and discovers some Very Bad Things inside. Then lots and lots of very bad things happen.

I really don't know about this one. I think I need to give it another issue -- although, that said, it's probably going to get dropped to trade, just because this is the sort of story that's probably going to read better in chunks. Judgement reserved, for now.

Anna Mercury #3 (Warren Ellis/Facundo Percio): In which Anna's current mission to New Ataraxia is completed, we see the real woman behind Anna, and we even discover that there's a reason for that magnificent and highly distinctive mane of red hair and those interesting boots (which are slightly less sensible than they first appear). We see boomerang commit -- and so does she, from an angle that would be positively insanity inducing if she weren't already apparently insane anyway. It's essentially an issue-long action sequence, and a whole hell of a lot of fun. I have to admit, I'm hoping that next issue we get to see Anna during her downtime, so we can see more what she's really like. Highly recommended, of course.

The Brave and the Bold 16, "Superman and Catwoman: Tempted", (Mark Waid/Scott Collins; DC): I don't normally read this title, but that particular teamup is so wildly unlikely that I had to give it a shot. It was really a lot of fun, a lighthearted done-in-one romp in which Superman is forced to team up with Catwoman to try to break up a criminal auction for something very dangerous. Highly recommended. (I do wonder what's going to happen with this title when DC Animated starts a cartoon with the same title, but very different content, next year. I'm guessing that it's either going to be discontinued, or shifted over to Jonny DC and the content changed; otherwise, it's going to be very confusing.)