365 Comics...278: Rocket Girl #1 (2013)

I had originally intended to write this up for this week's Thor's Comic Column, but it turns out I don't really have all that much to say about it, not yet anyway.  It's a cute book, something I want my daughter to read when she's like 11 or 12 (the only thing making it less of a teen book is the brief allusion to a blowjob).  The awkwardly named Dayoung Johansson is the titular Rocket Girl, a 15-year-old police officer from a drastically different 2013, a time and place where it seems teenagers are much smarter and more mature, though still teenagers, and in charge of everything.  This 2013 has a cityscape right out of the Fifth Element, flying cars and all, but it's like Bugsy with all these kids walking around acting like grown ups.  There's a Time Cop element, where Dayoung travels into the past (1986) in order to stop her future from happening, most of it centered around a specific group of scientists making a particular discovery or technological innovation.  It's a Skynet kind of situation.  Rocket Girl borrows familiar elements but in 20 pages, can't completely escape their familiarity perhaps with another two or three issues under its jetpack it'll start to come uniquely alive.  What it has going for it is Amy Reeder, a phenomenal artist whose brief work on Batwoman was enough to get me to pick up this book.  She's got such a distinct visual voice, her characters so uniquely her own.  Her characters always have amazing physicality and facial emoting that conveys so much more than the text.  She's close to Kevin Maguire level.  And if I were a 15 year old boy I'd have such a crush on Dayoung already...but I recognize that I'm an old man a crushes on fictional teenagers are gross and inappropriate.  I think Reeder's rendering of Dayoung is a young Uma Thurman though, and I've had a crush on her for over 20 years, so maybe that's partly it.

(Also, having just done an image search for "Rocket Girl" I'm so happy for Reeder and Montclare taking ownership of the title and strapping a rocket to their character's back instead of thrusting it like a huge phallus between her legs... it's a small step for womankind)

And huh, guess I did have some stuff to say afterall.