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Script: Magdalene Visaggio
Pencils, Inks, Cover: Sonny Liew
Colors: Chris Chuckry
Letters: Todd Klein
Cover Price: $3.99
On Sale Date: March 14, 2018
**NON SPOILERS AND SCORE AT THE BOTTOM**
Ooh, it’s that new series from the Young Animal
imprint! It’s got that “new comic book” series smell and everything! Let’s not
fart around and discuss niceties, instead head right into reading my review of Eternity Girl #1, right now!
Explain
It!
Based on the back-ups teasing this series during the
“Milk Wars” un-event of last night, I expected…well, I didn’t know what to
expect. I couldn’t really make heads or tails of those pages, though I
understood that it was some kind of satire on the chronology of comic book
storytelling. As has been done in several other comic works that “deconstruct”
superheroes. So I bristled at those back-ups, for reasons—not the least of
which were that I didn’t really like “Milk Wars” itself. It is difficult
sometimes to divorce the message from its carrier.
What I found in Eternity
Girl #1 was something much more delightful, still a commentary on the
superhero trope, but also an engaging story all its own. It’s really a story
about Caroline, one-time Olympic-level gymnast turned into a patriotic American
superhero named Chrysalis by the scientists of secret project Alpha 13. This
worked just fine, until a final conflict with her nemesis Madame Atom left
Caroline horribly disfigured, possibly in the possession of new mental powers,
and—most tragically—immortal. Now, she kills herself once a month, our of
despair, out of loneliness, out of boredom.
Because that’s what happens eventually, right? We’d
all like to know what it is to live a hundred and fifty, even two hundred
years. But beyond that? It must be mind-numbing. Watching wave after wave of
successive go-getters running for the prize, only for some of them to be cut
down in the prime of their lives by something stupid like an errant weed-whacker.
These kind of nihilist thoughts plague Caroline, until the spectral ghost of
Madame Atom explains that Caroline can end it all—if she just ends space and
time. And you know, by the end of the book, it seems she does just that. Sort
of.
I really enjoyed this book, which gave me a Black Hammer kind of vibe but was
actually less heavy on the comic books commentary than I’d anticipated. It
really is less about the “retirement years” of superheroing, and is more about
one woman’s coping with her unwanted and irreversible predicament. It’s about
the weight of omnipotence, and how crushing it can be so as to render someone
impotent. The visuals work well with this bleak story, and while it’s told
piecemeal, the narrative is very strong. I am very interested, Eternity Girl, in what this series holds
beyond the initial issue. For one thing, I would like to know why it’s called Eternity Girl when the main character’s
superhero name appears to be Chrysalis.
Bits and
Pieces:
This comic is about a woman facing her own obsolescence late in life. To make matters more complicated, she's also omnipotent. Is anyone looking to hire a goddess for their burgeoning society?
7.5/10
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