Jenny Sparks #1 Review

After having read it four times over, I still don’t know how to feel about Tom King, Jeff Spokes, and Clayton Cowles’ Jenny Sparks #1.

I’ve mulled over this issue for about a week or so now, going back and forth, re-examining it, thinking about what it’s trying to say, and the conclusion I’ve come to is that there isn’t much meat on me to chew on, at least not yet anyway. That, to me, sums up my big problem with the first issue of DC’s newest addition to their Black Label line:

It doesn’t do enough to dig a hook into the reader’s mind.

Some backstory before I go further into this: I’ve already read The Authority (Warren Ellis, Bryan Hitch, Laura Martin, Paul Neary, et al.), which is as far as my relationship goes with Jenny Sparks, the story’s protagonist. For those that this is important to, she certainly sounds and acts like the same character I loved in The Authority, so that’s not a point of conceit I have with the book in any regard.

Starting with the good stuff – I love Jeff Spokes’ art here. After seeing him illustrate the big Dawn of DC spread, as well as the Stormwatch stories in The Brave and the Bold, I was looking for more, and seeing him operate in full force is excellent. Tom King is also in his element here, as one of his strengths is undeniably the fact that he can bring the best out of his collaborators, and that rings true for the King/Spokes duo. Cowles also returns as a frequent collaborator in King’s work, and he’s as good as ever.

King’s understanding of the form and the craft that goes into the form is also well realized here. He effectively utilizes the 9-panel grid twice, and elsewhere, for the vast majority of the issue, panels take up the full horizontal length of a page, stacking up one over the other to really create that effect of motion, especially at times in ways that make full use of the comic book medium. I’m also a big fan of how the issue is structured; in not letting Jenny or Captain Atom interact with the humans until the very end, it helps to sell the divide.

But that’s as far as what I like about the issue goes. Narratively, there’s a lot of setup. There’s the obvious mystery of how Jenny is alive, as well as the question of why Captain Atom wants to be a “god” (or so he says), and it doesn’t quite build on either to leave me wanting more. For a quick comparison, I think G.O.D.S. (by Jonathan Hickman, Valerio Schiti, Marte Gracia, and Travis Lanham) was able to create enough mystery and give me a fulfilling first issue where I was satisfied reading it.

Even King books have done this – looking at Batman, The Human Target, Supergirl: Woman of Tomorrow, and Wonder Woman, for example. Those are all books with a strong hook in their first issue, but that’s just missing here. That makes it hard for me to really recommend this first issue, at least so far. If you’re a fan of any of these creators, maybe there’s something there for you, but for me, I need to wait and see what’s going on before I can provide a fair assessment.