Rating: WARTY!
This was another oddity from Net Galley in that it didn't specify that it was a graphic novel when it actually was. It's like this is the inverse of the other two which I'd initially thought were going to be graphic novels, but which turned out to be books of short stories. In this case I felt I was on safe ground since I know the publisher and the cover looked very graphic novel-ish! I really liked the cover and the graphics inside (the other covers inside were not so hot, but the panel work was to my taste and looked really good, I thought).
For me, the problem with this was the story, and it's story I come for, otherwise all you really have isn't so much a graphic novel per se as a coffee-table book. What attracted me to the story was the idea of a kick-ass female Evel Knievel and especially that such a person was the only one who could save Earth from an asteroid which seemed intent upon plummeting into the planet's crust. If it had actually been that, then this might have made for a great graphic novel, but it really wasn't in the end. The blurb was a bit more misleading than blurbs usually are because it turned out that Zoe wasn't the only one who could save Earth.
The two AI robots that were also advertised in the blurb turned out to be a bigger disaster than I'd feared they would be. I wasn't keen on them in the first place, but I was willing to risk those for a good story about two strong female characters. The problem with these robots though, is that they were far more 'A' than ever they were 'I'. I saw absolutely no point whatsoever to them, and their endless spewing of "Hashtag <smart mouth comment regarding current situation>" throughout the comic was fingernails-on-chalkboard irritating. In fact, in terms of being truly annoying, they were the equivalent of the two transformers, Mudflap and Skids in Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen, minus the racism, but every bit as bad otherwise.
I liked Zoe's "punk rock" sister, but why she was specified as punk when she really wasn't very punk at all, is a mystery. A rad haircut doth not a punk make! Despite this, she was my favorite, with Zoe second, the alien girl third. No one else rated at all because they were nowhere near as interesting as the three girls, which is actually quite a compliment from me! I think the two biggest problems though, were left-field nonsense and what felt like a thrown-together story. The problem was one of weight: there was too much silliness baggage for this story to be able to take off. One problem was how these guys got into space to go after the disasteroid (great name for the story, by the way).
Given that the space shuttle has long been retired, I saw no sense in 'resurrecting' it to get these guys into space, especially since the space shuttle was completely useless for anything other than low Earth-orbit missions. The new Space Launch System and the Orion spacecraft being built by Lockheed Martin and the ESA is what's going to be used for these things in future, and that's not likely to be ready before 2024, but it would have been nice to see it enter service in the comic world. The shuttle is way over-used in stories and film, and it's antiquated and tired-looking. Could the writer not stretch a little bit and treat us to something intelligent like that instead?
This wasn't the biggest technological problem. The idea that you can get onto a motorbike (which is powered by internal combustion), and ride it off an asteroid and down to Earth in emulation of the iconic if cartoonish sports-car drop in the Heavy Metal movie, was just ludicrous beyond belief. You can get away with this in cartoons, but if you're trying to make your story seem even remotely realistic, you need to understand some basic physics, the primary problem of which, here, is that an internal combustion requires air. There's no air in space! This is why we use rockets the fuel of which carries its own oxygen supply! Motorbike leathers will not protect you in space! These are childish mistakes which remove all hope of anything even approaching realism. Yeah, it's fine for Saturday morning kid's cartoons, but grown-ups need to be treated with more respect than this. Conversely there is air around the Earth and it will burn you up if you fly back in from space without adequate protection, which a motorbike and leathers will not offer!
This whole thing made me feel like this was fan-fiction, thrown together rather than thought-out, and it was a very unsatisfactory story, with someone who had a death-dealing chest wound coming back to life because "Hey, I'm a stuntman, I do it all the time?" No! Just no! It was simply too nonsensical and too fly-by-night. If the whole story had been goofy form the off, then these things would have fit better, but it wasn't. It was for these reasons that this failed for me, and I was truly disappointed because I had high expectations; but what seemed to offer an original, fun, and engaging story fell apart in the execution. I wish the author all the best. I think he has some good stories to tell, but this wasn't one of them.
