Patsy Walker gets sent to Alaska as part of the Initiative. Proving what a genius Tony Stark is, he only sends one hero to the biggest state in the U.S., and it's one who can't fly, teleport, or run fast. At least Patsy didn't have to worry about a having a Skrull infiltrator as a teammate!
What Patsy does have is an ability to sense magic and a nose for trouble. She's quickly on the trail of some suspicious bears, who lead her to a group of shamen (sha-women? Google says "shamaness," assuming I can trust it, which I probably can't), who task Patsy (or as they dub her, "Double-clawed Cat Full of Red Hellfire with Her Head Against the Wind and Comes Not Quietly from the Great Sea Road") with recovering their daughter, Ssangyong, from the terrible beast that has taken her.
It's a quest then, complete with an assortment of allies and an irritating guide that, like Navi in Ocarina of Time, Patsy just wishes would shut the hell up. With magic involved there are rules and traditions, but Immonen writes a Patsy Walker who is both well aware of these things, and confident/flighty enough to interpret those rules as she sees fit. At one point, to draw out an ally she requires but pissed off earlier, Patsy is told to 'lie by a grave.' Once the grave is located, Patsy stands atop it and announces that everyone loves her. Which is, of course, a lie, and the angry, antlered bear appears.
Things are not what they seem, the young girl (whose parents named her after a car, ouch) less an abductee and more a runaway. In a way, this makes Patsy even more qualified to help, as she's well-acquainted with an overbearing parent who tries to control your life. Two, if you count Moondragon's "mentoring," which mostly took the form of berating Patsy, if what I saw in Defenders was any indication. So she can try to reach Ssangyong through some oblique references to her own poor life choices and, when that fails, get frustrated, slug the girl, and haul her out like a sack of potatoes.
This was my favorite mini-series of 2008 (though the last issue got delayed and didn't come out until January '09.) It was funny and absurd. Crossing a chasm via a bridge made of little white rabbits, or Patsy arguing with herself about Iron Man blaming her for burning down Alaska. Lafuente's art is exaggerated without getting too loose or uncontrolled. You can tell who you're looking at or that Patsy's dealing with, even if circumstances alter them. He's got a good eye for detail in the clothes or the settings - Ssangyong's living in the wreck of an old sailing ship at the base of some frozen tower, with a Sasquatch who wears plaid pants and suspenders. (Phil's a real sweetie.)
Immonen's Patsy Walker is so many things, though I think most of all she simply follows her whims. If some creepy guy in a bar is bothering her, and dares her to chuck her mug at him, she'll do it without blinking. If the local guide is reluctant to help, she slides a big wad of SHIELD's cash at him to change the attitude.
She's able to adapt quickly or brush off disappointments. When Iron Man calls, she asks if she'll be assigned to Miami. He corrects her that it would be Florida, which causes her to shriek ecstatically until he tells her she's going to Alaska. One panel of a devastated Patsy, staring into space in a dress she's modeling for her neighbor, and then she's over it, asking who else is on the team and envisioning her and Beast skiing together in a daydream where Lafuente exaggerates his art a bit more for imagination effect. Did she want to apologize to the antlered bear, or track down the water lemming that kept smacking her in the face? No, but she needed them for the quest so she got over it.
(And when the bear demands she properly bury the dead body she lied beside, she tricks the wolf into attacking the bear to create the grave via impact crater. Again, she knows how things work, and knows how to bend the rules to her advantage without breaking them.)
The mini-series ended with Patsy's managing to broker a truce between Ssangyong and her mothers, and Ssangyong warning Patsy that she's got more magic inside her than she realizes. Immonen never got the opportunity to explore that, but another writer would.
2 comments:
I'm surprised they bothered assigning anyone to Alaska. I can imagine that they'd just outsource that to Alpha Flight. Maybe they tried, and the Canadians didn't want anything to do with Stark's Gestapo Initiative.
I was intrigued by who did get Florida (well, Hawaii, in fact, but I'll come back to that) and it was apparently "The Command", which sounds like one of those third-tier Authority pastiches that were everywhere for a while.
Members of The Command include Conquistador, who died and was replaced by, um, Conquistador (?), who was himself replaced by a Skrull version of Devil Dinosaur (??) pretending to be Conquistador (???); the Aquarian (!); Jennifer Kale; and one of the Deathloks.
My initial thought was "no offence to Alaska, but being the Initiative team for Hawaii must be pretty cool"; I was imagining a fun superhero Magnum, pi pastiche. What we apparently get is a bunch of people who appeared in one issue of The Initiative, another Skrull, Devil-Slayer, Stingray, and 3D-Man/Triathlon. Nowhere near as cool as Magnum, pi; nowhere near as cool as the Magnum, pi remake, even.
I'm sure Gyrich objected to giving those filthy Canadians a foothold in the U.S. of A.
I've always been fond of Stingray and Triathlon, but that's not the best team, certainly. That's what happens when half the heroes tell you to pound sand, and half of the ones left won't leave New York City. (Like, Carol Danvers was Pro-Reg, but she got her own special SHIELD strike force, and wasn't tied to any state.)
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