Sweetie Candy Vigilante #2 // Review
Pixie Stix is a dancer at the Ice Cream Bunny. She’s concerned about the way that things are going at the bar after a recent encounter. A strangely strong young woman walked into the place and turned everything upside down in a profoundly surreal way. Now, an enchanted tree named Tinsel has taken over the bar. Things are weird, and they’re only going to get weirder in Sweetie Candy Vigilante #2. Writer Suzanne Cafiero continues her festive, little journey into a dark candy cane nightmare New York with sweetly appealing art by Jeff Zornow and cozy colors by Ned Ivory.
There’s blood all over the hardwood floor. A white Christmas tree seems to be glaring down at a couple of corpses. The guy behind the bar is upset about the whole thing. Pixie is trying to make sense of things when the man in question attacks her. There’s little doubt that Tinsel could handle the situation, but he doesn’t have to. There’s an associate of Sweetie Candy’s at the bar. He’s a lycanthrope. Calls himself Candy Wolf. Once he’s dealt with the guy, he will take Pixie to Sweetie. There’s some explanation that’s going to have to happen on the way.
Cafiero is doing a good job of sketching out a weird Candyland nightmare shadow of Manhattan that gains a bit of complexity as the ensemble of characters increases. The title character only makes an appearance at the end. The title character is NOT the main focus of her second issue. It’s Candy Wolf and Pixie Stix. Thankfully, Cafiero makes both characters more than interesting on a pleasant, little snowy metropolitan drive while talking of strange mutations of horror. Cafiero is firmly developing a bizarrely sugary, small horror world in the shadows of New York.
Zornow’s art is like a cross between a Disney nightmare and something going on just outside of the frame of an old Rankin/Bass TV special. It’s oddly engaging artwork that seems like something that one might find if one snuck up on a Candy Land game board while it thought no one was looking. Zornow’s rubbery werewolf has a wonderful expressiveness. Pixie hasn’t quite distinguished herself. Zornow doesn’t give her enough individual personality, but as of Issue Two, she’s not all that defined yet in Cafiero’s script either. The snuggly feeling of Zornow and Ivory’s snowy metropolitan atmosphere holds the comic together beautifully.
Cafiero, Zornow, and Ivory have something here. It’s provocative without being remotely deep. It carries a mood with such a bizarrely distinct style that it’s kind of difficult to look away from it. After two issues, it IS a little easier to see where things are going in the series than it was at the end of the first chapter. Cafiero’s world is so weird that there remains a feeling that anything could happen going into the third issue. If she can keep the title character from showing up for the bulk of the second issue, she can do almost anything with it.
