3 out of 5

This is one of those series you hope will get a follow-up, because there’s certainly promise… but as a standalone it falls kinda flat.  Aero-Girl is another built-from-the-ground-up hero book, meaning creator Feenstra and artist Axur Eneas are designing their own world of heroes and villains, defining the rules by which they function, determining the moral and logical boundaries of the universe.  At best when this is done, you’ll get creations that sell you right away: you’re not considering how they stack up next to Batman or Superman; At worst, that’s all you can think about, is how so-and-so is a proxy for whichever character.  Feenstra takes a fairly laid-back approach to Aero-Girl, showing us new characters every issue, but not halting the flow to shoehorn in exposition that tells us all the Hows and Whys.  This works in the book’s favor: told, essentially, from the young titular heroine’s point of view, who’s already capable of villain-battlin’ thanks to training from her hero pops by the time we start reading, the world should be treated with broad strokes of good and evil that can be interpreted by any comic-browsing layperson; not only does this presentation make sense narrationally, it also skips a lot of the expectations – i.e. prove to us your world matters – we as readers have when you try to start on page one.

For an indie, youth-geared book, and whether a conscious decision or not, it was an appreciable way to not pander and start things off confidently.  The first issue also successfully shunts a generic setup – Aero-Girl wants to do more, mom says no, dad says maybe, we can sense foibles in the near future – into a really surprising last few pages turn of events.  The second issue manages to keep this ball rolling by not sinking into the emotional turmoil that we might expect.  …But… it strays so far from these norms that the story begins to feel like it misses a lot of opportunities, and ends up wrapping back around to be a normal good guys vs. bad guys tale in its latter half.  There are hints of depth that still trickle in, and combined with the solid world-building, it’s enough to make you wish for more, but sort of disappointed that our first arc with Aero-Girl didn’t really evolve much past its initial twist.

Not disappointing?  The art and lettering team.  Axur’s pencils are insane – they’re super stylized in their representation of humans but the look and the pacing and the sense of space is so well defined that it never gives your eyes pause; Juan Pablo Riebeling’s colors – benefiting from Action Lab’s generally bright production – embellishes the book’s sense of fun but does so without undercutting the non-hero, serious moments.  And Adam Wollet’s lettering is simply a buoyant delight, big and bubbly without crowding the panels.

So we have here a comic and character with much potential, and potential that’s clearly shown between the covers.  It doesn’t get to amount to too much in this introductory storyline, but hopefully it’s the first of several during which writer Feenstra can dig in and expand on his creations a bit.