I really did want to love this series. It's got an amazing aesthetic, straight out of the old movie serials, and Boyer's artwork is dynamic and beautiful. But it's such a boring story.
I feel like there's a bit of false advertising going on with the series. Each cover depicts an action sequence in a wilderness setting, pitting our heroine against either her antagonists or against the very environment itself. Hilly wields a laser pistol on each cover, sometimes firing, sometimes readying it for trouble. But here's the thing: the contents of the comic have been basically 4 issues of Hilly and her friends flying around a city, looking for clues to uncover a terrorist cell and never actually seeming to arrive anywhere, while her father, who is behind the terrorism, misleads her, all in the name of what he seems to think is love. It's a situation in which the exterior and the interior are completely unrelated, aside from the main character. So there's that.
My other complaint is that the editing on the book is just awful. And that's surprising, seeing as how cat yronwode, editor extraordinaire of Eclipse Comics, is at the helm. Admittedly, I'm a little more sensitive to such issues given my educational background, but when you're running across 3 or 4 errors in an issue, you have to wonder if anyone was paying attention. There are the usual "you're" and "it's" errors (if you can't use the uncontracted form in a sentence, it's the wrong word), but there's spelling errors too ("deminished"), and straight up factual errors (grass that might be a clue is called "fauna"). To me, when I run across such things, it smacks of laziness, or simply a privileging of the art over the words.
I'm going to give the rest of the series some time. Perhaps it's my state of mind, or the constant rain in Calgary for the last few weeks, but I'm not feeling as magnanimous toward the medium as I usually do. If you're going to put something out to the public, make sure it's a finished product. This, to me, is still a draft.
"Due to my undercover work, I have determined they are in actually terrorists." ("actuality," Boyer, "actuality")
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