Yumi:00EX #1 // Review
There’s a charming, young woman who is asking a well-dressed gentleman if he believes in love at first sight. He asks her if she’s going to shoot him if he says, “no,” Now...this might seem like a bit of an overreaction. It isn’t. She DID just shoot him with a pistol and she’s picking-up a much larger firearm as she’s asking him the question. So it’s a perfectly rational question to ask in the first couple of pages of Yumi :00EX #1. Writer Doug Wagner opens a witty, little espionage thriller with artist Hoyt Silva and colorist Kevin Lennertz.
The conversation in question happens in the central office of the chief of MI-6 in London. (Not Blaise Metrewelli. THAT would be cool, but no: it’s just some guy.) Anyway...Yumi has broken into one of the most totally secure facilities in the whole world because she’s trying to track down a guy named Richard. She’d fallen in love with Richard and she needs to find him. Finding him happens to involve stealing some very advanced tech from MI-6 and embarking on what most assuredly WILL be a very dangerous adventure for her an the car she’s stolen.
The super spy genre has been explored at great length from every possible angle. It's kind of fun to see a character who is more of an impetuous and selfish girl, casually walking through the impossible in the search of love, which sounds very unlikely. Yumi comes across as a fun character. The genius savant with no sense of firm grounding in emotional reality feels like a particularly fun blend of James Bond, Harley Quinn and the archetype of the manic pixie dream girl. Fun stuff on a whole bunch of different levels...at least for 30 pages or so per month.
Silva’s approach to the art flits back and forth from traditionally amplified cloak-and-dagger intrigue of the “real world” to the kawaii manga style of Yumi’s memories. It’s a fun contrast that feels suitably cool and fits the personality of the main character quite well. The overall layout of the pages feels like it's stacking the action in a way that amplify the sense of movement in the opening issue. Lennertz’s colors generally go against the grain of traditional, super spy visuals to present something that feels very flashy and colorful on the page.
As charming as Yumi is, she's got a personality. That's fun and smaller doses. And this is perfectly fine at 30 pages a month. However, it's going to start getting tedious if she doesn't have an opportunity to grow and evolved as a person to the nature of her personality is going to be fighting against this as she is perfectly in control of everything. Of course, it wouldn't be a fun series if there were quite a few challenges ahead. It's going to be a matter of presenting those challenges in a way that is true to the idiosyncratic field of the series. If Wagner and Company can do that, they'll have a really fun series on their hands.
