The 40 Years of Comics Project - The Bi-Weekly Graphic Novel Number 65 - Mother Panic v.2: Under Her Skin, 2017

I unfortunately did not read this series before reading the Milk Wars crossover issue, and so my reading of Mother Panic has always been skewed by my knowledge of what was to come. I don't think it detracted from my enjoyment of the story, just inflected it slightly. I'll say this for Gerard Way and his creators - they're doing some tight storytelling in all of these books.

I was trying to figure out what kind of feeling Mother Panic gave me, what it reminded me of, and then it finally came to me: The Prisoner. This all reads very much like the plot of that seminal series of the 1960s. Even Mother's white suit, its clean lines, are very Mod. The Gather House experiments are straight out of Cold War spy fiction, and Mother Panic's origin resembles nothing so much as the Black Widow's origin. Is there some homage there, a take on the character, but in white instead of black?

And the remnants of Gather House that keep popping up are terrifying. Not quite insane. Alien, perhaps. That might be a good way to look at it - they've been made alien, Violet included.

Art and story are insanely strong, which I should have mentioned in my review of the first volume, and might have but my memory's not great, but will mention here too just to stress the point. Top level superhero storytelling here. Violet Page is fascinating, and I can't wait to see what happens in the strange Gotham City she finds herself in at the end of Milk Wars.

Onward.

The 40 Years of Comics Project - The Bi-Weekly Graphic Novel Number 62 - Mother Panic v.1: A Work in Progress, 2017

Moments before starting this post, I left a comment on Facebook that was something like "Young Animal fills a Doom Patrol-shaped hole in my heart that's been there since the Empire of Chairs." "The Empire of Chairs" being the last story in Grant Morrison's run on Doom Patrol.

Hyperbole aside, after finishing "The Milk Wars" crossover, I went out and bought all of the stuff Young Animal has put out (with the exception of Bug - the trade comes out soon!). And it's all fantastically good. Each book is very different, each is telling its story in remarkable and innovative ways. There's a lovely aesthetic cohesion that binds all the books together, and I want to say it's Vertigoesque. Can we make an adjective out of that imprint, please? It's been influential enough to warrant one.

So Mother Panic is just great. I'm still not certain that Violet Paige fulfills the requirements to be called a superhero, but she's got powers and seems to be doing good things. My son and I were talking about this character and her story, and we've both come to think it's a very interesting look at class - perhaps as a metaphor for the ways in which class is reinforced in contemporary North America. Plus, as the series is based in Gotham, I feel like I've still got my toe in a nice corner of a universe that I barely recognize these days. Maybe that's why I like Young Animal's books. They're telling stories about the corner in which I'm comfortable.

Jody Houser has, or seems to have, a very clear idea of where this tale is going. And the art in the book evokes the grittiness of Gotham through the lens of Violet's often hallucinatory world view. Lots of people accuse Batman of being every bit as mad as the villains he confronts - Violet is actually much closer to that level of mental illness. The difference is that she recognizes it for what it is, something that was done to her, and decides to make every last person involved pay.

And if she saves some people along the way, so much the better I guess.

Onward.