| Title: | Jennifer Blood |
| Contributors: | Garth Ennis Adriano Batista |
| Publisher: | Dynamite |
| Issue #: | Vol. 1 |
| Year: | 2012 |
| Pages: | 144 Pages |
| Age Rating: | 18 (Language, Violence, Gore, Nudity, Sex, Adult Themes) |
| Story Grade: | C |
| Art Grade: | A |
The entire story is told in part through narration of Jennifer's diary entries and part through more active dialog. In her diary, Jennifer chronicles her struggles with the real world challenges of being a wife and the mother of two kids and finding balance with her needs to seek vengeance. Oddly I am not usually a fan of diary narratives as they are fairly passive reads and I find it hard to engage in the story being told. But recently this narrative storytelling technique has worked in a couple of books I have read.
As an example of Jennifer's struggle, she talks about her need to sedate her family every night so she can go out and kill the bad guys. She begins by asking herself, via her diary, if she should feel bad about slipping her entire family Valium so she can sneak out undetected. Then a short while later, with her family passed out throughout the house, and she is carrying them all upstairs to their respective beds, even her husband, she states in a diary entry that she is feeling bad for drugging her family, and that she needs more rest so she doesn't forget to get her family to bed before they pass out from the dosage.
Ennis has done a great job in developing the complexity of this character in Volume 1. And while the theme is very familiar, Ennis addresses some new territory for this character type. Just like John Cusack's 'Martin Q. Blank' character in 'Gross Point Blank', Jennifer struggles with balance between what she truly is and what society thinks/expects she is. Ennis explores some deeply adult and funny subjects with this character and keeps nothing from the reader.
While the first few pages of Volume 1 start off a little slow, it is worth exploring the world Ennis builds for you. It is colorful, dark, funny and just like Martin Blank's character, you can't help but root for the anti-hero in this story. But there are some issues with this book.
One issue I have with the story is that Jennifer is too good of a killing machine. It makes it hard to invest in a character when there is no concern for the welfare of the character.
Another issue is that there are some blatant references to the Punisher. Page one of the book shows her diary sitting on a table and under it is the subtitle of the book, War Journal. Any Punisher fan knows that Ennis did some amazing work on Punisher, but it feels a little cheap seeing him pimping his past credits in his more current work.
The last issue I have is that this story has been told thousands of times. And while Ennis addresses some new challenges for the character that haven't be addressed before, the core of the story is just a simple rehash of other stories; Mr. and Mrs. Smith, True Lies, Kill Bill, Punisher, Gross Point Blank, Le Femme Nikkita, Bloody Mary, etc, etc.
The artwork, by Batista, is awesome. Heavy lines and deep shadows are used when Jennifer goes into assassin mode and lighter lines and less shadows when she is in stay-at-home-mom mode. But even in mom-mode, there is a shadow of the assassin hiding in the panels.
And while the story feels tired, told so many times it hurts at this point, I still found Jennifer Blood enjoyable and funny. Hell I laughed out loud several times while reading it and I will be reading Volume 2. I grade this volume a B, but this isn't for kids folks (just read the age label above to see why). The artwork is great, but the while story is truly just a rehash of stories that have been told time and again with some new twists thrown in, I still found it enjoyable.
Until next time... Think about who you married? Do you really know him or her?
0 comments:
Post a Comment