Weekly Comic Book Review

By Terry Moore (writer), Craig Rousseau (art), Guillem Mari (colors)

The Story: As a thunderstorm rolls into the city, Mary Jane must deal with her new found moniker as “Limo Girl”! With her alter ego status catching on with the student body, the annoyance level begins to mount up for poor MJ. Even the faculty have it out for her!

Meanwhile, Flash Thompson confronts Peter Parker when he discovers our resident science genius has been giving Liz Allen private calculus tutoring sessions (twice a week no less!).

What’s Good: It took three issues, but Craig Rousseau’s art is finally growing on me. There’s a lot of personalities on display here thanks to the strong use of facial expressions; it sells the story completely. Another thing I like is the relaxed demeanor of the characters. It brings out a casual element that make them seem like real high school students. The supporting colors by Guillem Mari are quite good and help alleviate scenes where Rousseau neglected to draw backgrounds.

Terry Moore’s conversational dialogue is filled with lots of one-liners and that’s how teenagers talk. They don’t go on monologues or diatribes like heroes and villains (or Kevin Smith characters). They either beat around the bush or are upfront too a fault, and whatever way they choose to speak, it’s usually very shallow in nature. Moore is very good at portraying this.

What’s Not So Good: The story doesn’t really go anywhere. Mary Jane groans about her new status and takes no steps to remedy the situation. This is actually believable, however – most kids would probably just try to ignore it. That said, a large portion of this book is spent making fun of her new status as Limo Girl, yet without any sort of follow-up (or action taken) are readers supposed to just ignore it too?

The cliffhanger comes very abruptly and even worse, awkwardly delivered. At first I thought there was a page missing from my book, but then I saw the “To Be Continued…” stamp at the bottom of the page and my worst fear was confirmed: I was being given a “What the hell?!” moment.

Conclusion: Last issue was the strongest yet by the new creative team. And while Craig Rousseau seems to be gaining artistic confidence with the characters, the story takes a step backwards with its general lack of progression and clunker of a cliffhanger.

Grade: C-

- J. Montes