Title: Dude, Where’s Her Car?
Publisher: Marvel Comics
Writer: Robert Kirkman
Artist: Derec Donovan
Colorist: Transparency Digital
Letterer: VC’s Dave Sharpe
Cover: Casey Jones
Publisher: Dan Buckley
Welcome back to Marvel Age, a place for impressionable youths get to pick up comic book stories that they are able to relate to. They are supposed to grab stories that their mother’s and father’s could pick up and go ‘Yes, I approve’. Stories that are there to nurture them into a false sense of security that comic books are good and pure.
That is what Marvel Age is supposed to be about. With Jubilee though, I have learned that Marvel Age is also about substandard story telling! Learning is fun.
Please take note of the WOQW that accompanies this review. It is for those who want to pull this comic out from under the birdcage where they left it and play along with the annotated version.
Story
A preface that I make before all of my Marvel Age reviews: You are probably not the market audience for this story. It is geared towards younger kids, and with this title, girls. So yes it does gain a certain amount of leniency – only some though.
So, Jubilee lives in LA with her Aunt (who is some kind of mercenary) and she’s waiting to be asked out to the big dance by the hunky jock. Sweet, hmm? There’s your plot.
Oh, the stolen car bit, I almost forgot about that.
Jubilee is a peer counselor at the high school, which she gained as an ultimatum to getting kicked out. Her teaching advisor, Ms. Kingsley, has had her car stolen and Jubes takes it upon herself to go find it. So this mouthy little Asian girl goes into the hood, gets a thug she recently met to help her – and they have their own little private adventure. There we go, THAT’S your story.
Again, my problem with this title is one of caring. Kirkman obviously does not give any kind of care about this book. The dialogue comes across VERY stilted and unreasonable, and the actions of the details of character don’t make sense! Between the thug, aka Shooter, accepting Jubilee as an equal to having Jubes walk in and outright making fun of the people she is supposed to be helping (with no negative repercussions) … it’s really kind of deplorable that Marvel would want this book going into the hands of a kid.
As I said earlier, this book should be granted certain leniency because it is a book for a younger audience, but it does nothing to enforce that. Given its violence, and message that you should take things into your hands, it’s no different than a standard comic. There is nothing in this title whatsoever, other than it’s main character is a high school teenager that makes me consider this a ‘youth title’.
Art!
In my review of the first issue I commented that the art, as the book carried on, became more and more racially offensive. We are now on #4, and Derec Donovan has found a certain amount of consistency finally, but it is not a nice constant. If you look at the Casey Jones cover, you can see subtle Asian features in Jubilee’s face. If you look at Donovan’s, you think you have literally begun watching a bad Fu Manchu film. Every facial characteristic that is stereotypically Asian, he has enhanced to scary proportions. Her eyes are single lines where they started off a little rounder, and the coloring has her in various stages of jaundice.
Overall!
This issue marks me done with this title. I’m not intrigued, I’m not hanging the slightest to find out what’s going to happen next, and it upsets me that a book like this survives while a perfect MARVEL AGE title like Mary Jane gets stopped.
For a blow by blow panel by panel destruction, I ask you to please check out this week’s WOQW: Annotated Jubilee.
