Family
Creative Staff:
Writer: Natalie Chaidez
Art: Andy Belanger
Color art: Daniela Miwa
Letterer: Serge Lapointe
Editor: Sebastian Girner
Cover art: Andy Belanger
Title & cover design: Jared K Fletcher
Book design: Jeff Powell
What They Say:
Underground MMA fighter Dani Libra fears nothing…except for her recurring blackouts and fractured memories that obscure a bloody past.
But when her sister is kidnapped, Dani must shine a light on the darkness in her own mind. Only question is—can she keep her own demons at bay for long enough to save her sister?
Content: (please note that content portions of a review may contain spoilers)
TKO Studios is something I’d heard general rumblings of as they announced. I don’t keep too much up with comics, besides reading the Ta-Nehisi Coates Marvel comics and Power Rangers, so all I knew is that they looked cool, both in concept (releasing an entire trade at once is very cool!) and with what I read about their initial stories. I’m happy to be able to check them out.
The book quality is top notch. I got the trade paperback, but the idea of having individual issues in a nice collectors box also appeals to me. But the paperback is thick and solid, the paper feels nice, and it doesn’t have the gloss of the Marvel comics I’m used to handling, which I like a lot. The gloss sometimes makes it harder to read because of the glare. And despite it being bigger in every direction from a typical Marvel trade, it didn’t feel cumbersome in my hands to read (I read it at my desk in a regular ol’ office chair, for context). I’m very impressed by just the quality of the product.
The story itself is as the back of the book describes—a story about trying to an older sister trying to find her younger sister. But it’s of course so much more than that. Dani finds not just her sister (spoilers, it will not be a sad story in that way, though the initial tease and subsequent turn was a very good red herring), but a whole family.
Dani and her sister Espie crossed the Mexico-Texas border when they were kids, and were picked up by a guy named Sal, who took care of both of them as his own. When Espie is kidnapped, it’s Sal that Dani goes to because he’s the only one she can trust. And that trust runs deep, even though they don’t see eye to eye on Dani fighting in underground MMA rings.
The comic seemed to be relatively interesting given the goings on around the first and second chapters, but it wasn’t really hooking me. It’s great action, and some great tension, but it was lacking another element to the story that it just hadn’t quite gotten to yet. The focus on the first half rightly should have just been on finding Espie and unraveling that mystery. Getting closer and closer to Espie was driving everything, and laying in the background was some things Dani forgot, a coping mechanism for the horrors that went on when they crossed the border. It causes her to black out randomly during fights (seemingly just times of high exertion or stress, or both) and some of her forgotten memories come back to her after those blackouts.
But the latter half of the comic is what particularly interested me, and it has almost nothing to do with the Espie kidnapped storyline. Through Dani and Sal’s travels together, they realize they’re just being kind of pig-headed toward each other and they truly do care about one another. They reconcile, helped by some racist idiots who…surprisingly turned out to be the nicest group of dudes in the comic, save for Dani, Espie, and Sal.
The group calls themselves the Patriot Council and go around, uh, gathering up who they think are Mexican immigrants and putting them on trial to see if they’re worthy to enter the US. It turns out that Sal had adopted Dani and Espie soon after he took them in, so they’re both US citizens, but this Patriot Council (who, by the way, go around wearing powdered wigs) wants to see how American this clearly Mexican woman is. She gets to fight against Paul Revear (because he takes people’s ears) and also there’s snakes all around her that could bite and kill her.
But what’s more American than being bitten by a snake then fucking up a dude named Paul Revear who’s twice her size?? Nothing!! They immediately give her a map of exactly where she needs to go, which is too crazy for them to go to themselves, otherwise they might have helped them.
This little storyline was maybe the wildest thing I’ve read in a bit, but dang if it wasn’t also very entertaining. What seemed to be an eye-rolling story about these racist idiots (hopefully) getting the crap beaten out of them by Dani and Sal became a somewhat endearing story of racist idiots becoming friends with a Mexican immigrant, the very target of their racism. Comics is just wild, and I love it.
The story also serves as a reminder to Dani that she does have a father, both in practice and now legally. It’s something Dani overlooked in all their time together because she knew a birth father, so she didn’t see Sal as anyone but this dude who helped raise her and her sister. She meant a lot, but could never mean as much as her birth dad.
Then she really does find her dad. They go to Blood Rock, one of the places Dani and Espie were when they crossed over, and there’s a whole bunch of cultists who are crazy and cannibals. Just all around not good. They’re also the ones who killed the girl near the beginning of the story and the people who Gonzalo told Dani to look for when she broke several of his limbs. He says he was a captive of the cult, and leads them to where Espie is. Sal doesn’t feel right about this, but who’s more trustworthy than Dani’s living blood father?
This is where the comic got me because the turn here was not expected, but everything was also working out just a little too conveniently. It worked out a little too conveniently because you should always trust the person who seems more dad-like, and that was always Sal. Dani’s birth father brought her from a nice life in Mexico to the US, where he claimed they could make more money. But he was part of the cult, and they asked him for the sacrifice of his wife and daughters to prove his loyalty to the cult, and he obliged. He trekked with them to the US to the slaughter, only for them to escape. But Sal saw it. He was always there for them. He was a complete stranger who brought in these two girls and raised them for nothing.
It is always, always the family you make and the family you find that is stronger than the one you’re born with.
In Summary:
Pound for Pound wraps up maybe a little too easily, but it is a great comic overall. It comes with a message that will, of course, resonate with me in particular, and keeps the action up throughout to keep interest high if there were any lulls at all. I blasted through this comic pretty quickly, if it was any indication of my interest level in it.
I am only slightly disappointed that a comic I glanced at, saw MMA, and thought it was going to be all sports comic is not, in fact, only a sports comic. But I’m glad to have what this came out to be. It reminds me in some parts of the character aspects of Megalobox, if that interests any anime fans reading.
Content Grade: A-
Art Grade: A-
Packaging Grade: A
Age Rating: 17+
Released By: TKO Studios
Release Date: November 12, 2019
MSRP: $19.99
