Broken Frontier

I've never been a racing fan. It isn't that I have anything against the concept, but cars and car-related activities have never been my forte. Entertainment revolving around racing has never fascinated me. The Fast and the Furious? Fell asleep. Initial D? Couldn't stand it. Cars manages to be the only Pixar movie I haven't seen - and if Pixar can't grab my interest in racing, what can?

Misfile, apparently.

Racing isn't the core premise of this comic, but races are where most of the action takes place - and are a surprisingly effective way of resolving highschoolers' conflicts. As to how Misfile manages to make racing engaging, there are a lot of factors at work. The main characters' personality contrasts help: Ash's enthusiasm plays well against Emily's automotive unfamiliarity. The racing scenes show skillful pacing in a medium that really isn't the natural fit for them. Genuinely clever strategy making the racing more than just a matter of speed.

All of this grabs the reader's interest. It's ironic the comic focuses on something so earthly, when Heavenly stakes are what are actually at hand. Ash and Emily might be the two primary characters, but coming in right behind them are the angels Rumisiel and Vashiel, and the main plot point is a heavenly mixup, caused by Rumisiel. Misfile blends the ordinary with the extraordinary.

Rumisiel is an angel from Heaven - where God has withdrawn from the world, and now a massive bureaucracy oversees the planet and keeps everything in order. Rumisiel is a poor excuse for an angel: he gets caught smoking pot when he was supposed to be keeping the celestial filing system in order - resulting in his exile to Earth. Whatever data is stored in the filing system is actively reflected back on Earth. Thus Rumisiel's misfile turns Ash into a girl, and Emily regresses in age two years. Rumisiel, Ash and Emily are the only ones who know this is wrong. They all want it fixed - but Rumisiel can't do that until he gets back into Heaven's good graces, which requires him to do good deeds until he's proven worthy of returning to the celestial fold. Ash and Emily have to keep their problem secret, because if Rumisiel's bosses find out about the mistake, they'll cover it up to avoid taking the blame - and they'll do so by wiping the minds of everyone involved and making sure it never gets fixed.

The premise has potential, and that potential is realized... mostly. Misfile focuses on personal lives, exploring how Ash and Emily adapt to these abrupt changes, and over the course of the story they grow as individuals and into a complex relationship with unlikely romantic tension. What Misfile doesn't focus on is any actual attempt to fix the misfile itself. The characters are resigned to sitting and waiting for it to be fixed.

That said, the action isn't slow. The characters get to deal with all the typical teenage problems of school and grades, arguments with parents, finding jobs, etc. And racing. And the appearance of a couple other angels, such as Rumisiel's incredibly nice brother Vashiel... and Cassiel, Lucifer's niece, out to disrupt their lives by any means possible. Things are not dull. But the actual resolution of the conflict at the heart of the strip remains hovering on the horizon, indefinable and out of sight.

This isn't a bad thing - the longer the strip goes, the more time to enjoy the story and see the characters develop. And recently the series has raised provocative questions about what fixing the Misfile will mean. As a girl, Ash contacts his mom who left when he was young, and has a good relationship with her - while as a boy, he had never seen her since she left. Emily's friend Molly is in a car accident - a friendship disrupted by the age regression. If not for that, Emily might have been in the accident herself - and likely killed.

And at the heart of it all - if it wasn't for the Misfile, Ash and Emily would never have met. Would putting things back in order undo the friendship that has grown between them?

These aren't questions the characters can answer any better than the readers. It's a tough choice. Do they fix their lives if they risk things going horribly wrong when they do so? Can they afford to? Can they afford not to?

Misfile has many, many humorous moments, but there are some serious questions at the heart of it. When a comic about pot-smoking angels can make you sit back and really think, it is clearly doing something right.

Webcomics do gender-swaps frequently, but I can think of none that have handled it as well as Misfile, mining the situation less for laughs and more for insight. It feels real.

Misfile also manages to avoid running into the unintentional sexism that often creeps into any comic about genderbending. Ash is creeped out by the situation because it isn't who he is, not because being female is somehow inherently worse than being male. Showing his reaction and frustration with the situation as a personal struggle, rather than a more general battle between being male or being female - that is a hard line to walk. In this story, Ash might be closeminded about certain things, and as sexist as the next sixteen-year-old boy, but the story doesn't reinforce those beliefs.

The art style is manga at heart, and starts out a bit unsteady, but Chris Hazelton personalizes the style and makes it his own. Occasionally it gets a bit over the top, but in general, the expressions and format works keep the story light and move it along at a steady pace. The art works well... when I can read it.

The layout, while clean, doesn't always move your eye in the right direction. Case in point would be this recent page, wherein the dialogue boxes want you to read from top to bottom when the natural inclination would be to read from left to right. Also, each page comes with a watermark in the lower right corner, and when that watermark covers up valuable information, I find myself disappointed.

But these problems only crop up once in a blue moon. Most of the story moves along without anything to distract the reader from the stellar tale unfolding before them.

Misfile has many worthwhile moments: spot-on portrayals of parental guilt trips and the uncovered dark past of a guileless character - but its biggest selling points remain constant between the moments: entertaining premise, likeable characters. File this under "keep."