It’s difficult to be a teenager–managing raging hormones and insecurities, circles of friends and even worse, enemies. Now imagine you’re an alien being in the body of a teenager experiencing high school for the first time. What fresh hell is this? Loma and Megan have taken a back seat and Shade has emerged. Shade is slowly discovering that the feelings she was trying to escape from on her own planet are quite similar to those within Megan on Earth. Seems that someone wants to remind us that we cannot run away from our problems.
Shade, the Changing Girl #2 (DC Comics)
This issue meanders and is more of a buildup for future storylines rather than having any real action. The library is the only scene that offers us any new information. One aha moment is when we discover that Loma can relive memories through touch. This is obviously setting the stage for the discovery of what happened to Megan to cause her coma. Then Shade–or the madness, it’s not really clear yet which–brings the books to life to scare off her pursuers.
The relationship between Megan and her mother is difficult to pinpoint. It is awkward at best. The line Megan’s mother uses about how she thinks her school uniform “will still fit” indicates just how ill at ease she is with her. Awkward or not, there is no reason for her mother not to pick Shade up at school at 3 pm as promised except to set up the rendezvous between Shade and River.
Mellu investigating the theft of the vest keeps us clued into the interplanetary component of this story. During the investigation Mellu mentions that madness destroys what it touches, introducing an element of danger that this story line needs to pick up the pace. Just exactly how long can Lepuck keep his Loma insanity chamber coffee table a secret? I hope to see more of this side of the story in coming issues. I do not feel that there was enough character development of Loma in the first issue to make me interested in her story line. From what we learned of Megan thus far, she appears to be your typical mean girl. I am more interested in the experimentation with madness than with Megan and why her friends offed her.
Did I like it? It was okay. I wanted a bit more action and found myself a little bored. We just lolled along through Loma’s discovery of the human body and high school classes. The story is a bit shallow for my liking. I hope they dare to swim in the deep end in future issues.
My Fears? That Mean Girls and Pretty Little Liars just dropped a tab and wrote a comic. I am holding out for more and hope I am not disappointed.
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