Broken Frontier

Billed across the Net as “Mad Men meets The Dark Knight”, Red 5 Comics’ newest creator-owned offering Moon Girl would seem to have a lot going for it – or a lot to live up to. Those properties place Tony Trov and Johnny Zito’s reboot of the short-lived EC Comics character in some pretty heady company, maybe too heady.

First appearing in Fall of 1947, Moon Girl was the brainchild of comic book giants Max Gaines, Gardner Fox, and Sheldon Moldoff. Lasting a short, turbulent twelve issues, a run in which the title changed no less than four times before settling on A Moon, a Girl…Romance (!?) for the final four installments, Moon Girl finally left the series when it became known as Weird Fantasy with number thirteen. From Moon Girl and the Prince to Weird Fantasy in the space of thirteen issues…Damn, the Golden Age of Comics was a rockin’ ride!

Trov and Zito snagged Moon Girl after she faded into the obscurity of the public domain and have adroitly set their stories of her career in the mid-1950s. This would be where the Mad Men comparison comes into play. I’ll let the Dark Knight analogy lie where it will. Overall, the decision to push the setting into the fifties is a sound one. It allows Moon Girl a distinctiveness that sets it apart from other nostalgia projects that typically take place during World War II. As we’ve all presumably learned from Mad Men, the 1950s in America wasn’t all baseball and apple pie. Apparently, just like every other period of human history, there was a lot drinking, smoking, and fornicating going on.

Unfortunately, this storytelling mother lode of sexual and emotional repression goes largely untapped in Moon Girl. Oh, it’s all in there but it reeks of apple pie and the bubblegum you get in baseball cards. The conflicts in the book are overt, lack emotional weight, and most often come in the form of physical confrontation. Despite the hype, Moon Girl is very surface-level stuff and devoid of the technical, emotional, and stylistic sophistication of Mad Men. Or The Dark Knight. Even the lush, fully-painted panels of The Rahzzah (What are we, twelve?) only reinforce the superficial similarities between Moon Girl and the aforementioned properties.

All of this confounds me even more, when I consider Trov and Zito’s Moon Girl first appeared early last year on Comixology. With such a publishing lag between Web and print, why not take the opportunity to tweak the book a bit? Moon Girl quite obviously isn’t in the same league as either Mad Men or The Dark Knight, so if you’re intent on using those comparisons as a marketing ploy, put your mad money where your mouth is.

Hell, they could’ve at least found poor Rahzzah a name…