3 out of 5

Hmeh hrm hmph.  I’m guessing this book happened because Marvel something something testing the waters of the popularity of their S.H.I.E.L.D. TV show comic counterparts.  I didn’t even give it a glance when it came out, but it merited enough sales to warrant an ongoing title, which got a grand ol’ review causing me to pick that up, and I says to myself, I says – “Hey, you’re not gonna want to get home and love the new Mockingbird series and be sad that you didn’t pick up the ‘prequel’ book,” so I bought that too.  Even though, mind you, my flipthrough of that ongoing sorta made me mumble: Hmeh hrm hmph.  See where this is going?

So, yeah, maybe I don’t really get the hype.  Bobbi Morse, as scripted by a female writer, wakes up in bed with a cute boy (Lance Hunter) and muses as to how his abs compare with Clint Barton’s.  Not against this; not making any gender-in-comics statements here, beyond that I look forward to the day – may it happen – when you can’t really tell if it’s a male or female writing these things.  Or is that a worthwhile wish?  Meaning – does it strip POV of value if you remove that element?  Impossible question.  But let me balance the scales real quickly (and then get back to the review) by saying I similarly eye-roll at the masculine writing style – and yes, I do think I’m more aware of how deviously ingrained it is thanks to recent years bringing more attention to our biases, so kudos to that – and that I’d be happy to do away with that as well, though, again, I’m not qualified to evaluate how much that would totally topple certain genres…  ARRRGH, MOCKINGBIRD CAUSE TOO MUCH THINK FOR WRONG REASONS.  Blenyhow, Bobbi compares abs, then sees a newspaper article about somebody murdered dead, goes to the morgue with the son of the deceased to perform an autopsy, and solves the mystery of the murder lickety-split with clever “logic” that’s tantamount to fucking hand-waving bullshit.  Writers do this a lot: toss in some phrases like “analyzed your behavior patterns” and filter it through their internet awareness of the world and put on a smug smile like they just wrote the new Portal game.  (Guys, no worries: Portal is a fave.)  Or maybe Chelsea Cain is wicked book smart, and just didn’t deliver the material in a way that made me feel equally smart while reading it.  Either way – the story is entertaining but nothing special in my mind, and Joëlle Jones delivers her as-usual wonderfully fluid character designs, but the background and colors are too mismatched computery bland and end up making a lot of the pages feel flat, like 90s comic books when they just discovered computer printing (in my made up comic book history).

So, ya know: hmeh hrm hmph, and we’ll see how the ongoing goes.

BUT WHAT’S THAT THREE STARS UP THERE?  Well, gang, to justify a 4.99 price tag, Marvel stuffed a “Red Widow” short in the back, written by Margaret Stohl and illustrated by Nico Leon, and while I have no idea how this Red Widow fits into Marvel right now, this lead-in (I think) to a prose novel by the same author, doing a tit-for-tat sequence of events that show Red helping a friend in Brooklyn while Black Widow does some spy stuffs in Hong Kong, was sorta a hoot.  Like, in the way that I’m looking up the book.  I can’t call buying the one-shot for this “worth it,” but it definitely helped perk up the reading experience immensely.