Thrown Into the Deep End

Yeah, that's a lot of laser fire. Or singularity bombs, or whatever it is they're throwing at her.

Star Power is an online comic, but you know me, I prefer to have physical copies of things, so I picked up the first volume, Star Power and the 9th Wormhole, a few months back. The comics follows Danica Maris, a lab technician in the astronomics section of a deep-space research/defense/cultural hub kind of location. Danica gets tapped to be the last of what are called Star-Powered Sentinels, and is almost immediately under attack from forces bent on making sure her stint is as brief as possible. She's got to figure out what she can do, who's after her, protect herself, protect the station, and try to deal with the threat, and do all of it pretty much at the same time.

Michael Terracciano writes Danica as mostly cheerful and eager to help others, endlessly curious, a bit self-sacrificing, and prone to getting down on herself. She seems quick to blame herself if something doesn't work out. But it's kind of endearing, alongside her excitement over the chance to learn and explore, and her tendency to quickly grow attached to inanimate objects. At one point, she's asked to attack one of the station's security droids to test the limits of her power, and she's reluctant to blow it up because it helped her out during her first fight (it's what she's sitting on in the panel above).

There's a lovely sense of just how much is out there that we haven't seen yet. The Millennium Federation, who Danica works for, has a thousand worlds within its boundaries, and that doesn't even encompass one spiral arm of the galaxy. But there's a variety of alien species, albeit most of the ones seen in this volume are roughly humanoid, bipedal organisms. Maybe that's just how it is in that universe, or maybe that's particular to this station, or region of the Federation. Don't know yet. There are mercenaries and the Void Angels, who are some sort of crazy destructive militaristic group, just to start with, could be a number of other problems. The empire that created the Sentinels covered most of the galaxy at some point, and is, as far as we know so far, basically collapsed. But that doesn't mean there's nothing and nobody out there.

Terracciano goes the route of having Danica's powers be known to the higher-ups at the station, and then makes sure those characters are both supportive (within reason), and competent. She isn't stuck under the thumb of useless bureaucrats who make it harder for her to help people. They know their jobs, they do them well, Danica's powers just give them more help with that. It's interesting that both Dr. Brightman and the Security Chief agree they shouldn't let their bosses know, because Danica will end up dissected. They didn't actually manage tom keep a lid on it very long, but that wasn't an approach I expected, either.

I kept thinking Graham's artwork reminds me of someone else's, and the closest comp I could come up with is Salva Espin. Which is fine, I generally like Espin's work. They aren't identical; Graham's inking is heavier than what's normally on Espin's, and that tends to give characters very solid appearances. Strong jawlines, browlines, and noses. Graham doesn't exaggerate for comedic effect as much, but it isn't really that sort of book. The humor is more understated, the style where one character says something, there's a silent panel where it sinks in, then some sort of reaction in the third panel.

I wish there was a little more variety in Star's color scheme for her costume. There are some concept sketches in the back of the trade, and Graham originally toyed with some that had a large star somewhere on the front. Depending on the color, that might have been a good call to break things up a bit. I do like the design for the power's tutorial/operating system, which is a small, swirly ball with some script revolving around it. A little starlike, a little like a ghost, not too flashy (because you probably don't want to alert everyone to the thing helping you out), but distinctive.

Panel layouts are straightforward, 5-7 panels for most pages, the emphasis is on getting the information across clearly to the reader. Graham knows when to back up for a sense of scale, and Terracciano knows when to stop the dialogue and just let characters fight (although Danica is usually trying to resolve things peacefully, so she tends to talk a lot).

The first volume ends with the possibility that Danica burned the power out stopping the 9th Wormhole, but seeing as I just bought the second volume today, I'm going out on a limb that doesn't last for long.