Brandon Montclare’s Rocket Girl still doesn’t feel like all that clear of a story, but it’s such a hyperkinetic jumble of excitement that you don’t really care.
DaYoung is in the teenage NYPD of 2013, which involves rocket packs and hilarious pubescently-mustachioed commissioners, but she’s jumped back in time to the 1980s to stop Quantum Mechanics from doing things that will eventually make them a corrupt entity. Right now, though, in 1986, Quantum Mechanics just seems to be a bunch of overwhelmed and befuddled science folks who have had a rocket-girl from the future fall into their laps. Meanwhile, the evil Quantum Mechanics of the future have sent sky-cycle jerks to try and capture DaYoung, who has an awful first name.
It’s a bit confusing and vague, but just when you’re about to get a headache, Rocket Girl #4 gives you an issue full of a girl with a jetpack doing crazy mid-air acrobatic stuntwork to try and evade the cycle jerks trying to steal her jetpack, and you get sucked right into the adventure. Montclare’s world is an interesting one, where teens serve in the NYPD like it’s an enlistment service, and then get jobs at Quantum when they hit 20. That seems like a crazy madcap system, but it seems to work for 2013. Then again, DaYoung has gone back in time to try and change everything, because Quantum is jerks. She believes she’s succeeded, but then we keep getting flashbacks to 2013 stuff suggesting maybe it’s happening concurrently even though it’s labeled ‘the past’ and – wow, look at how awesome that rocket pack girl is!
Rocket Girl is really a showcase for Amy Reeder, as she goes balls out with a wild aerial dogfight in a subway tunnel and makes it viscerally thrilling, pacing it so well that you’d swear you could see her characters animating themselves, while Montclare scripts the action in such a way that it never feels like a foregone conclusion, and victories never come easy. That’s what keeps me coming back to this series. It just keeps on moving like a freight train… or, well, a rocket, and you’re either along for the ride or you’re in DaYoung’s dust.
Rocket Girl is kind of a blast.
