Monday, April 11, 2016

Faith Vol 1 by Jody Houser, Francis Portela, Margerite Sauvage


Rating: WORTHY!

This is what happens when you put a bunch of women in charge: you get a great super hero comic! (Note that only two out of three of the above are female, lest I get any complaints!) Talking of which, my only complaint - it was too short for me! I got an advance review copy which was more like a sampler - just two episodes plus and really intriguing third episode consisting of line drawings with no coloring or speech bubbles, which was interesting to see - like looking at a skeleton before the flesh and organs are added. Very cool for anyone who's interested in how these things are put together (which I am as it happens), but I don't imagine it will appear like that in the published version, so get it from Net Galley while it's...not! I have to say that both the writing and the artwork were excellent. Nicely drawn, beautifully colored. I am really thankful I got a chance to review this.

This superhero goes by the name of Zephyr, and she borrows somewhat from Superman. In this case she's disguised with eyeglasses and a wig and looking rather frumpy. Definitely a better disguise than Clark Kent has. And she actually comes off rather better than he does base don his last movie outing as of this writing. Those of us in the know are looking forward to Wonder Woman busting loose next year. Does Zephyr work for a newspaper? Well not in this day and age! She works for some sort of a webzine, although it's a bit vague as to what, exactly they do. Nothing very exciting as judged by Summer's comments about it. She really blossoms, though, when she takes off the wig and eyeglasses and launches herself into the sky (she commutes to work from Van Nuys, which isn't so nice since her neighbors are noisy).

So what's with the 'Faith'? It's her real name: Faith Herbert. She's known as a "psiot" - someone who is psionically gifted. I have no idea what that means since it isn't really explained. I assume it means she has some sort of psychic control over her environment. Bullets don't bounce off her, but they do bounce off her psychic shield, which she can project rather like Sue Storm does, for example.

Faith/Summer was working with a team of heroes, but something happened between her and a more traditionally proportioned masculine hero to whom she was evidently about to be married. She moved away, and people who have seen her fly the skies locally are wondering what happened. I mention 'traditionally-proportioned' because Faith is not. Rather than your standard female egg-timer hourglass figure for super heroes, Faith looks more like the egg, and she's all the more charming for it. The best thing about it is that no one makes any apology for her being a big bodied woman. It's who she is and how she is and that's all there is to it. I was delighted to see this for a change, and especially in a super hero comic book.

The blurb mentioned aliens. We see little of them here. But that's not important. What is important is that there's a new and realistic hero in town and I want to read more about her! I recommend this one.