Thursday, August 25, 2005

This Comic Is Good - Strange Girl #3

At a time when Marvel and DC seem to be going to hell, it is nice to see a comic that makes hell seem kind of fun.

Strange Girl, written by Rick Remender with art by Eric Nguyen and colors by Joelle Comtois, is a good book, whose third issue just came out.

The concept of the book is simple, we are now ten years after the Rapture (where all the saved people ascend to Heaven, and all the others are...duh duh duh...left behind!), and a young woman named Beth, who had been kept as a pet by a demon (who even taught her some magic) tries to make her way into heaven to reunite with her family. Along for her on this ride is her guardian demon, named Bloato.

The title of the book is Strange Girl, and it certainly is a strange book, but really, what is remarkable about the book to me is Remender's characterizations of Beth (the woman) and Bloato, and in particular, their interaction.

It is the highlight of the book, by FAR.

Bloato is a demon, that's his thing. Demons are NOT very nice. However, he IS nice to Beth. So the ways in which he does good things is, of course, quite humorous. Like when he gives her mouth-to-mouth, but makes sure to slip in some tongue and cop a feel at the same time.

Funny stuff.

Meanwhile, Eric Nguyen's pencils are just all over the place, but in a good way. The demons' designs don't make sense, which is funny to see (by what I mean is that there is no symmatry to their designs).

Meanwhile, his depiction of what the world looks like now that it has been ruled by demons from Hell for ten years is quite interesting (as is Remender's ideas of how such a system would operate).

Comtois' colors are very stilted, giving the book an almost dream-like sense, or better yet, making it look like they are filming them in the middle of a very hot desert, as the heat makes the image fade.

The ending is quite a shock, but one has to realize that we do not know much about demon physiology, so who knows what shape he is in at the end of the book. However, if that IS what happened, then Remender followed the rules - make the audience feel because of what YOU put out there on the page, not for what some other writer did ten years ago.

Good book.

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1 Comments:

Anonymous Anonymous said...

Sounds neat. I'll check this out.

-Dan

8/26/2005 02:23:00 AM  

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