The chaotic situation continues.
Creative Staff:
Story: Tim Seeley
Art: Priscilla Petraites
Colors: Marco Lesko
Letterer:
What They Say:
Reluctant reporter Kennedy Avis, finds herself in the clutches of the God Hackers, a group of teenagers attempting to jailbreak their own bodies in the pursuit of superhuman powers. The key to human evolution now flows through Kennedy’s veins. What lengths will they go to to get back her head?
Content: (please note that content portions of a review may contain spoilers):
Brilliant Trash in its debut was a messy and chaotic work that introduced a lot of things quickly, which is designed to capture your interest and attention. That’s been part of comics forever, though I’ll admit I like series that work a little tighter and clearer to give me a hook into it, a connection. That was ostensibly done with the journalist, Kennedy Avis, to give us our eyes into this world. The problem is that her story was alongside what feels like a dozen others so it’s just moving fast and without anything to really connect with yet. It’s also made very busy thanks to Priscilla Petraites artwork, which is fantastic, but everything feels like it’s in motion and intense even when just standing around talking. That just made me tense reading several pages.
A lot of what we get here is also standard fare in that Kennedy is getting exposed to a lot of new things by people that know it all and just toss it out there, leaving her and us with questions. Which is fine, when you have enough grounding for what you think is your lead character. Kennedy’s finding herself with this group that calls themselves the God Hackers that are basically rewriting their DNA to get abilities, working the whole “jailbreaking what god gave us” mindset. It’s actually an interesting way of working the idea and the phrasing of it all and we get a brief almost scorecard-like approach to filling us in on this group that have her. None of it connects for me because of how busy it is and I get the sense that just about everyone outside of Kennedy at this stage is expendable so I’m not feeling like it’s worth investing in any of them.
There’s a lot of other things going on in the background with the group looking for Dr. Zhen that put this data into Kennedy and we see a creative way that’s dealt with. We also get someone else that has found Zhen’s body and has gained a few clues from it in order to find Kennedy from it. With Kennedy herself, however, she’s struggling with the after effects of what Zhen did to her and having flashbacks of Zhen’s life and the drive she had to achieve her various goals, though it’s not something that lands well narratively as it’s spread throughout the book and just adds to the overall jumpiness to it. It also doesn’t help that the God Hackers want to retrieve the data from her, which will ease her problems, but don’t particularly care if she lives or not since the data is what’s important. That doesn’t exactly enamor us to the group even if you know that they’ll likely change their tune as the series goes on.
In Summary:
Brilliant Trash jumps around a lot and has a lot of things going on. There’s a lot of exposition here but it doesn’t feel like it really reveals anything. I’m still trying to get a handle on this world design with what it’s about and how it works but I’m feeling more like Kennedy than anything else, being thrust from situation to situation in crazy ways and unable to get my bearings. Seeley’s a strong writer to be sure and I’m hopeful that things will even out so that I can really connect with it, especially as I want to enjoy it thanks to Petraites’ artwork as there’s a lot to like here. But there’s something about the structure and the lack of enough foundation for me to latch onto that’s making it rough to get into.
Grade: B
Age Rating: 16+
Released By: AfterShock Comics
Release Date: December 13th, 2017
MSRP: $3.99
