16 year old Addison’s world is turned upside down when her boyfriend is murdered. Which of course means she has to become a... celestial avenger… ?!
Mia Goodwin’s Tomboy is laughably bad and I didn’t enjoy reading it at all. After a certain point, the amount of nonsense that had piled up actually gave me a headache!
SPOILERS because in order to explain why I didn’t think much of this one I have to go into plot details.
Goodwin’s writing is simply atrocious. Addison just happens to be behind the door where the gym teacher is talking on the phone, saying out loud that Nick, Addy’s boyfriend, is dead. Well that was convenient! And then Addison just happens to be on a train – that just happens to be empty – with the two cops who killed Nick who just happen to be absurdly talking out loud ADMITTING THEIR CRIMES and one of them even shows off evidence that he took from the crime scene to prove that he dunit?! WTF?! Later on at a funeral reception, one of the corrupt cops says his suspicious out loud – there’s nothing hackier than having characters say what they’re thinking. Jaw-droppingly contrived, this is kid’s level plotting.
The world-building is incompetent. Out of nowhere, Addison gets superpowers?! Has she always had them? Who gave them to her? What are they? She must have powers otherwise how could a little girl brutally murder two grown men. How is her boyfriend a ghost – does everyone who dies in this world become a ghost? Why don’t we see more ghosts then? How does her favourite anime come to life? There’s an Angel of Mercy – is she connected to any of this? Why is she enlisting the help of Addison’s grandfather? Oh and her granddad is a bargain basement Punisher called Justicar (what a stupid name)! Nothing is explained, everything is just thrown together and none of it works at all. This is Anything Goes: The Comic!
Tomboy as a title doesn’t make sense as Addison is actually quite feminine. Are we meant to like Addison? I didn’t! I think the girl is full on cray! Does the anime actually come to life or is she just nuts? Is her ghost boyfriend real or is she just nuts? She doesn’t just kill or beat up her victims, she flat out mutilates them. She rips their guts out, pops out their eyeballs and plays with them – what a fucking psychopath! She’s the “hero”?
It’s not hard to see why she’s such a basketcase though given her grandpa, “Justicar” (who keeps his dead wife – who’s somehow managed to remain freshly young-looking – in his closet!?!?!). His instructions to her regarding her vigilantism:
“There’s no grey area here. No mercy, no doubt. When you’re out there, this is the only rule: no crime goes unpunished. No criminal walks away. No matter who they are or what they’ve done. The sentence is death. Are we clear?”
I’m guessing Mia Goodwin’s a fan of Steve Ditko’s Mr A? The simplistic morality is stunning. It boils down to “they were bad so they deserved to die” – again, kid’s level thinking.
I liked the obviously anime-influenced art which was very skilful, though I didn’t think much of Justicar’s unimaginative costume – he looks like a longshoreman with a balaclava! The book’s tone is very uneven. The art is extremely cutesy, as are many of the sequences like anything featuring Addison and her girl friend, but there’s no way this could be recommended to kids given the explicit gore. I don’t know who the target audience is for this garbage.
Even if I overlooked all of that, the story was still uninspired drek composed of cliches. The baddies are an evil corporation with corrupt cops on the payroll and Addison is literally The Chosen One (really!) destined to take them down. It reads like a bad Batman story: an unconvincing police procedural centred around a flash drive of incriminating names for a court case involving the evil corporation.
I knew there was a reason why I usually avoid Action Lab – they put out suck comics! Tomboy, Volume 1: Divine Intervention is a boring mess of a book.
No comments:
Post a Comment