15 Love 1

The best interior page from 15 Love # 1. No, sorry, this is as good as it gets.

MISERABLY MODERN MILLIE

Remember Andi Watson? One of the rising stars of the latter twentieth century, who brought us Breakfast After Noon, Slow News Day, Skeleton Key, and other delightful, imaginative, lively stories?

Guess what? I just found out he has a counterpart on the Bizarro World!

This…. thing… purports to be a modern-day reinterpretation of Millie Collins, a.k.a. Millie the Model, as a fifteen-year-old would-be tennis champion, hence the title.

What it is, is the most tedious comic I’ve read in a very long time. Where it should be vivacious, energetic and light, it is leaden, plodding, listless, the figures (I hesitate to even call them ‘characters’, as that invests  them with more depth than they deserve) going through soap-opera cycles without even a trace of innovation.

I can’t figure it out. Andi Watson’s no neophyte; everything he’s previously done has been, even when it hasn’t been to my specific taste, of a reliable and high standard. But this – has he had his brain replaced by string? Been forced into indentured servitude by alien robots? Dog run off with a fundie preacher? There’s got to be some causative factor for a synaptic misfire of this magnitude, for someone so accomplished to fall this far from his own standards.

But the credit isn’t all due to Bizarro-Andi. Oh, no. He had an accomplice.

Step forward, Tommy Ohtsuka, who has apparently worked for Marvel before, on Lords of Avalon, Marvel Mangaverse, and a bunch of other titles I ignored the first time round. Just as well. Because his lumpy, muscly, and curiously greasy art style is repulsive. With another artist – Watson himself, for example, who’s no slouch with a pencil – 15 Love might have achieved pleasant blandness. As it is, it’s the sort of comic that repels the eye. You try to read it, conscientiously, determinedly, and then suddenly ZZZT! and your eyes are off the page and wandering around the room in search of something, anything, more appealing to look at. Seriously, Department of Defense? Cover US tanks in pages from this comic book – no enemy fire’ll get anywhere near them!

Why was this reinvention even neccessary? Just two years ago, we had a ‘reimagining’ of Millie the Model in the delightful  Models, Inc., bringing Mil and her gang up to date, integrating them into the Marvel Universe, and bringing us laughs & action aplenty, courtesy of Paul Tobin, Marc Sumerak and Colleen Coover. It was fun, engaging, and visually attractive, everything 15 Love isn’t. So what possessed them to recast the franchise in such an unappetising manner?

Plus – it’s FIVE DOLLARS AN ISSUE! Who do they think is going to buy this? I can understand them not releasing it as standard-sized issues, extending the suffering to six comics, because I confidently predict it’d never finish, but at five bucks it’s way beyond an impulse purchase for most, even if they’re too incautious to flick through it before buying.  Marvel would have been better advised to relase it as a one-shot, similar to DC’s ill-fated Minx line, then they might at least have shifted a few copies to the unwary on advance order. As it is, the only folks who are going to sit still even for the truncated (but double-thick!) three-issue run are tragic aging fanboys who just can’t turn away from a train wreck. (Yeah, I know, I’m right here. ..)

(Dials phone) Hello, Bizarro World? We’d like the real Andi Watson back now, please…