Marvel Girl 1

I can’t quite work this out: it seems to be set pretty early in X-Men continuity, presumably to link in to the new movie set back then, but it sets up Jean as, in Professor X’s words, “one of the strongest beings on the planet,” which was certainly not the case in the original run of X-Men comics. Her exploding with anger at harmless comments by Iceman seems out of keeping with any early version of Jean that I have seen, too.

Still, I don’t much care about continuity if what we get is worth the breach. However, this reads rather like yet another one-shot that is being published because someone decided they needed the title rather than because someone had any ideas for what to do with it. It is better than Chaykin’s limp recent Magneto one-shot, to be fair. This tells a story with some personal resonance, albeit of a hackneyed ‘stop being guilty and make the most of your life’ lesson type that we have all seen many times before, but at least there are specifics that more or less work for Marvel Girl.

But what I liked best, and what made me give it a go despite the dreadful other one-shots I’ve read lately, was the art, which is distinctive in two ways. Firstly it looks very like animation art: slick, solid, the sense of figures against a static background. The second reason is rarer: Plati is responsible for pencil, ink and colour, and instead of drawing it then colouring it in, he produces genuine colour art, using colour in striking and original ways. For instance, Jean’s ghostly memories of childhood have coloured ghost images blurring their focus, and Scott’s eye-blasts are rendered entirely in colour, making them look very powerful. This is helped by some excellent page and panel compositions. This is not to say it’s all good – his faces often have as little nuance in their expression as animated characters, unfortunately. Still, it is refreshing to see a style that looks different from those we see all the time.

I guess in the end this is a comic that is worth looking at for the art, but the story is not substantial enough that you really have any need to read it.