Friendly Neighborhood Mary Jane #1 // Review
M.J. is on her way to a meeting with a guy named Flash. In another world, he had been a football star in high school back in the 1960s. He had served a tour of duty in Vietnam. But that was another world. A lot has happened to him since then. In other worlds. Now he's in a wheelchair. MJ has an offer for him in Friendly Neighborhood Mary Jane #1. Writer Ashley Allen Open a new chapter in the life of Mary Jane Watson with artist Phil Noto. There's a lot of potential in what is being put on the page in the first issue. Should be interesting to see where Allen takes it.
Flash knows that MJ has been running around with superpowers lately. He also knows that she's lost many of those or recently. The.Venom symbiote has recently left her. But when it did left her with a little bit of itself. So that she could protect herself. And other people. That's not what she's there to talk about, though. She's got this business proposition. She's going to be starting her own production company. Off Broadway. She's going to give young creatives an opportunity to explore their own work.
It's actually a very common dream amongst young people who are working in theater. To be able to just have money to work on something of their own. Alan taps into that a bit. It's nice to see MJ evolving the way she has over the years. This is something that is more common to a female characters that it is to mail characters. MJ has been through a lot over the course of the past several decades. Alan finds something new in a slightly different framing of her life and adventures. It's also nice to see casual characterization of somebody who would prefer to have their own thing going on, but still has the ability to help other people. Alan does a really good job of constructing that inner complexity for MJ.
Noto balance is a lot of things really well. There's subtle nuance in the drama that's being brought to the page. And it feels so distinctly New York. With the central offices for marble, having moved out to California, it's easy to think that they might lose some sight of the city that defined them for well over half a century. Noto perfectly captures the personality of Marvel Manhattan in an appealing fusion of action, science fiction and street level day-to-day life in New York City.
It doesn't necessarily make a whole lot of sense with respect to continuity, it's nice to see that Mary Jane evolve. She’s gone from being a kid never seen directly in the panel back in the 60s to being a love interest for Spider-Man. Girlfriend. Wife. Banned in recent years she's become a very interesting character in her own right. More or less perfectly poise as someone with an actual life that actually evolves unlike so many other characters in mainstream superhero comic books.
