4 out of 5

Street Angel joins a gang.  Why?  Free pizza.

As is the case with any individual SA story, whatever the one sentence gist is is generally the whole deal: no subtext, no nonsense.  Well, sure, nonsense, but not in any kind of character arc, world-building kind of way.  And yet, as with the Adhouse collection, there’s this fascinating cumulative effect to reading a whole bunch of these things sequenced together where you do start to get those details, or perhaps it just gives us the time and room for our imagination to start linking together the various references to peoples and concepts unseen (generally done for humor’s sake) our creators leave along the way.

…Which is why these one-off GNs are a strange deal.  Because that is the major case against them: the typical SA structure of kerfluffle and then Jesse (our skateboarding, ninja-kicking ‘angel’) shrugging it all off and going home can feel really slight when not surrounded by other tales.  Super Hero For a Day abused this to the greatest extent, with the kerfluffle hardly even happening.  Street Angel Gang, on the other hand, is probably the best possible variant of this, with something of a beginning – Jesse asks to join the gang – middle – Jesse proves herself to the gang – and end – Jesse… is Jesse – while still fulfilling the Angel m.o. of ‘who gives a @#!%?’  Brian Maruca’s art and colors are also fully taking advantage of the oversized printing, with some gorgeous splash pages, rife with life and character, and with the remainder stocked with a cast (with trading card bios, but of course) that’s just fun to look at and be around.

There’s still the slight tang of wishing the conclusion amounted to more – even one more beat to drive the punchline home, or something – but I might also feel that way because the rough draft of the script that’s also included has, by my opinion, a much more amusing way of concluding things.

$19.99 is still a crazy amount for this, but, as mentioned, I’d say this edition is the best case scenario for this one-off, HC series.