Tuesday, October 1, 2019

America Fast and Fuertona by Gabby Rivera and assorted artists


Rating: WARTY!

Presumably because the writer is Latinx, there's the occasional Spanish phrase or word in here which isn't translated, and that's the way it should be, because the contest gives it all you need. Fuertona though, means forceful or strong, in case you wondered. I got this because I thought it was about a female Captain America and in a sense it is, because I understand from some back-reading that America Chavez - in that endless asinine merry-go-round of every Marvel hero subbing for every other Marvel hero, She does don his mantle at some point, but that didn't happen here.

Given the strong Latin influence, I don't get why she's American. Why not simply make her Mexican or have her hail from some South American country? It made no sense to me, but that's the way comic books all-too-often are. She has to be an American hero because god forbid we should ever have a hero come from some other country! And if we did, the insular American media consumers would have about the same interest in this as they did in the MIB International movie!

So anyway, she's attending a school for super heroes, which again made no sense, especially since she was always sneaking off to do her heroics without so much as a by-your-achieve. To be fair, in this case, she does have some cause since the new head of the school is a villain - they went out of their way to make that painfully obvious. I'm surprised they didn't name her Adolfa.

What bothered me wasn't so much the story which was pretty much par-for-the-course for a comic book, but that the artists, several of whom were female, went out of their way to portray America and the chief spandexed villain ("Exterminatrix" seriously?) in as tightly-clad, bare-skinned, and pneumatic a manner as inhumanly possible. That's a fail for me. So was this comic book which gets a wart-rating of five per square inch. What's the point in introducing a diversity of super heroes if all you're going to do with them is make them exact clones of all the previous heroes??? Look for my up-coming OC rating for graphic novels starring female characters!