2 out of 5

This is a massive improvement in terms of art and writing quality over the first Minky Woodcock series, as Cynthia von Buhler better adapts to the comic format, but it’s also still limited by being more a collection of facts than a story.

Minky – the daughter of a respected detective, having inserted herself into the family practice when her father becomes ill – is the shell of a good character, but in the same way that Buhler repurposes trivia as plot points, Minky is also mostly recycled “strong female character” tropes, which I guess I’m lucky enough to live in a time to call pretty stale by this point, but it’s more that it’s just too clearly artifice; that Minky slips a nip and sleeps with both men and women and has a pet rabbit because it’s all kinky and quirky, and not that it feels actually like part of her character, or even part of her world, because the world, too is artifice. Once more, we can look to the backmatter for evidence of this: one of the more puzzling story inclusions is adding Josephine Baker into the mix, and while this could absolutely be done in deft ways, via Buhler, she’s just stuck in there because she thought it was interesting. And I recognize that’s gotta be where most ideas start; I’m just quipping that it doesn’t get much beyond that “this is interesting, let me include it” concept here.

This is extended to Minky’s involvement in the mystery of Nikola Tesla’s death: she gets hired to investigate the man for various reasons; she befriends him; he dies – spoiler for history – and she keeps on the original investigation while also moonlighting to solve the case of his death. As with the Houdini premise from the prior series, this is totally fine, except yadda yadda see above: the execution is lacking.

On the plus side, Buhler’s photo reference style looks so much better here, abandoning the distracting storybook flourish and overt mixed media and taking better advantage of angles to map to a comic book page’s eye direction. Additionally, her actual craft has improved as well, with some funky faces still occurring, and the resultant super-stiff “action” of photo reference, but the art feels / looks drawn instead of strictly traced. Similarly, though I’ve clearly taken issue with the beat-by-beat storytelling, the narrative construction on the pages is solid: Buhler’s dialogue flows well (if expo-dumping when trying to backpedal her fiction into the history), and the story is paced pretty effectively, with legitimate issue-by-issue beginnings, middles, and ends.

The HC collection isn’t as impressive as before, since a lot repeats, but we get a HCC ad, a repeated bio on our creator, and then some story background plus a moderately cringey “Tesla would’ve saved the world” rundown of his inventions.