Spider-GIrl #3 // Review
Maka peeks her head out of the curtain that serves as her bedroom door. She asks her mother how much a pony would cost...theoretically. She doesn’t explain WHY she’s asking, but there’s a whole story behind it involving $50 she got from an assassin who robbed some thieves and well...there would be a lot to explain about all of that. She’s just been given $50 be a villain. What’s she supposed to do? This is the least of her worries in Spider-GIrl #3. Writer Torunn Grønbekk continues a compelling look at a kid webslinger with artist André Risso and colorist Java Tartaglia.
The lady Bulseye is trying to explain to her associate the the Spider-Girl is, in fact, a girl. She’s just a kid. Bullseye explains to her that the kid is just getting started. He had difficulty even hauling the robbers up onto the roof. Then taunting the people in the alley afterwards was probably a pretty juvenile move, but she WAS warning them about the police. She’s just a kid, but she’s got a lot to learn and not a whole lot of time to learn it. Things have a tendency to be more than a little bit tricky for any web-slinger living in Manhattan.
Grønbekk run the risk of trying to start too many different plots and too many different story elements in a single issue. However, there's just enough space for each scene and just enough space for each plot development to play out without making it feel too crowded. The central conflict of the $50 is something that has a residence in that particular economy. There had been issues with money for just about every slinger and Marvel going all the way back to the original. But there's something very vivid about the idea of just handing the hero $50 from a crime scene and trying to figure out what it is that they're going to do about it. There's a kind of way to that.
Risso does admirably with a challenge that has popped up over the course of the years. It's not easy to do realistic portrayal of a kid wearing a Supergirl costume. Even Ditko made a high school sophomore like a little bit more like an adult when he was drawing Spider-Man under the mask back in the 1960s. Risso not only gives the title character, proper proportions and personality, but he also manages to make her believable in the way she moves around the page. Her posture and her body language feel very much like that of a kid. And this is quite an accomplishment, given the fact that she's doing super heroic things and superhuman things. It's not easy to reconcile that with the overall look of a child. Risso does a very good job of this.
Overall, the idea of having this character, of age on the page is something that's very difficult to manage. There are some very seasoned authors who tried to have heroes who were children in the past, and it's never quite managed in a way that would have the kind of sophistication that it needs to really get across the idea of elementary or junior high school kids as superheroes. Grønbekk is really getting into an interesting depth with that here. It's subtle in places are and around the edges of the central conflict, but it's absolutely there.
