Comics Fondle

And down again. Well, not completely, but closer than it ought to be. Vaughan embraces his standard practice for the series again–shunning Tefé as a protagonist and instead showing the human response to her actions. Here, it works, but for a handful of dumb reasons. First and foremost, he’s not reminding the reader every other page the terrible things Tefé’s Alaskan boyfriend has done. Second, he comes up with a decent action climax to the issue. Zombies and such. It’s neat.

Of course, there’s the big “however.” However, Tefé’s mission is still dumb, but at least it appears she’ll find that bit out too. And Vaughan spends half the issue on the mysterious agents after Tefé, the Sunderland Corporation if he’s on the ball, but since he’s not, Mr. Big (there’s a Mr. Big introduced in this issue) will probably turn out to be… Mick Jagger. Or something. These mysterious agents seem to be working with the rogue elements of the Green, which is as goofy as it sounds. Petersen’s art looks weird here, like they just switched over to computer coloring, and he plays up the goofy too somewhat. I can never take his faces seriously.

The other big waste of time is Vaughan’s characterization of Tefé’s target. He cheaply gives the girl a terrible life, but unless he turns the series over to her (oh, crap, he might do that), it’s lousy to give a guest star more page-time than your titular protagonist.

The issue’s far better than the series’s worst–and Vaughan seems to have turned some of the problems around… just not enough.

C

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