Comic Review: Alpha Girl #2 (Image Comics, 2012)

The second installment of this new Image series continues in the same maniacal spirit as issue #1, as authors Jean-Paul Bonjour and Jeff Roenning keep the story moving at a furious pace. This issue is largely spent establishing the scenario and raising the stakes: glimpses of a world beset by zombies, intercut with the larger story of our heroine’s travails. Blood flies, monsters chomp, and people run for their lives.

Robert Love’s art is sharp and dynamic, equally adept with action sequences and character moments; the script flies by, new insanity waiting around every turn. Characters are introduced and then killed off in the space of a few panels, delivered and dismissed with fanciful delight. All manner of freakish events occur. There’s profanity and blood and guts and nudity and fetishism and death by neck-chomping. The quick cuts can be a bit jarring at times (I paused to flip backwards a couple times, to make sure I hadn’t skipped a page by mistake), but the general spirit is so joyous and anarchic that it doesn’t matter. You can feel the fun the creators are having with this book, creating something gross and graphic and gratuitous and genre-bending; the perfect synthesis of teenage drama and zombie apocalypse.

Alpha Girl is an ongoing series from Image Comics, available in all good comic shops. Issue #1 was previously discussed as part of Depth Of Field’s “Image Comics In Review” series.

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