Jenny struggles with her past.
Creative Staff:
Story: Dave Dwonch, Brockton McKinney
Art: Magenta King
Colors: Megan Huang
Letterer: Dave Dwonch
What They Say:
Jennys BIG secret revealed . . . and no one is more shocked than HER! With the discovery that she’s more like her father, Mega Commander Zero, than she thought, Jenny must now fight off a legion of monsters, save a city from destruction–and find enough alcohol to forget the entire ordeal!
Content: (please note that content portions of a review may contain spoilers):
The opening installment of this series was a fun experience as I’ve never read anything from Dave Dwonch or Brockton McKinney, so I was interested to see what they’d bring to the page. It was a crazy mix of western comics and Japanese manga with a flair of European style mixed in that definitely worked well both in story and visual design. The book brought me to my first experience with Magenta King and their artwork and that definitely plays to the mix of styles in a good way with a lot of detail and some solid flow to the panels and layouts. It also helped that Megan Huang really did a great job of bringing the artwork to the next level with her color design.
With Jenny having gone through her transformation, which shocked her pretty well, we get a lot of pretty fun scenes with her early on trying to cope with this while also dealing with the enemy that’s attacking her. This book does a lot of flashbacks to highlight how her path has gone over the years and the secret that her father knew about her that she was just like him, which he ensured that Fujimoto kept secret from her as well. That’s not something that makes him trustworthy at this point where he wants her to take on a more formal role like her father did in protecting the peace because she’s completely unable to trust him now. And rightly so when you get down to it as he’s known her the best out of most people and still couldn’t level with her about this over the years in order to prepare her for it.
Thankfully, Jenny’s able to revert back to normal and get debriefed a bit but it’s her longtime friend Dana that shows up and helps to hustle her out of there and into a bit of mild “hiding” to get away from things for a bit. I do like we get a good flashback to when they were younger, showing how they met after Jenny’s father’s death since both their fathers worked together, and how Jenny was never able to corrupt her. It’s amusing seem then as teenagers and going through this kind of weird first meeting but we also get the introduction of the dog that has now become a part of Jenny’s life. This issue does some good expansion on the foundation of things so that we know who jenny is and the kind of hard relationship she’s had with Fujimoto over the years and why she doesn’t intend to be like her dad. It’s kept in short quick hits of information across it as a whole but it works effectively.
In Summary:
Jenny Zero continues to be a pretty fun book with a lot of weird things going on that I’m curious to see explored out a bit more. I can see the larger path that things are likely to take with it but what we get here is welcome as it explores the characters and their pasts and motivations in a way that felt as natural as it could with the way it moves back and forth. The artwork is definitely appealing with the character designs as well as there’s a great kind of energy to it. I’m definitely curious to see what it really wants to be by the end but we’re again off to a really good start.
Grade: B
Age Rating: 15+
Released By: Dark Horse Comics
Release Date: June 2nd, 2021
MSRP: $3.99
