Write More Comics, Chelsea Cain!

Going into this comic, the only thing I knew about Marvel’s superspy hero Mockingbird was that Tyra from Friday Night Lights (Adrianne Palicki) played her on tv. Smart, cheeky, and more than capable to beat up everyone in the room. Sounds good to me! That’s why I picked this one up from the library. 

A few pages in, I was hooked. The writing is smart and fun. I laughed so much in this book that I assumed Kate Leth wrote it. Nope – Chelsea Cain penned Mockingbird. As far as I can tell, she’s primarily a novelist. I don’t know how she got involved in comics but I hope she sticks around.

Cain’s Mockingbird is first and foremost a scientist. She approaches everything through the frame of the scientific method. In my ideal universe, we’d see her team up with Batman to do some world-class detective work. She grabs a biological mystery and won’t let go until she’s solved it. That’s the premise of this particular book. Along the way, she infiltrates underwater lairs (reminiscent of adult swim’s sealab 2021), London’s Hellfire Club, and other exotic locales.

I loved the art, although it was almost too pretty for the book at times. The coloring in the book is gorgeous, with a pastel palette similar to Phil Noto covers. Other parts are more cartoony with a simplified palette, like Hellcat.

My only knock on the book is that Cain Tarantino’d it and it wasn’t clear to me until I read her note in the book of the collection. If you do read this book, read it in order and then go back to the beginning. Issue one is totally different.