Jesse Sanchez is an orphan, a martial artist, an expert skateboarder who goes by the name "Street Angel." As a caption box informs us in the first issue, she fights 'for the poor, the forgotten, and whenever possible, for food.'
Rugg and Maruca originally published the 5-issue mini-series in 2004 through Slave Labor, though I picked this up as a nice hardcover released through Adhouse Books about 10 years ago. Over the five issues, Jesse saves the city (and the mayor's spoiled, uselss daughter) from the villainy of Dr. Pangea, finds herself in the middle of a ninja/conquistador war, complete with an oblivious Irish astronaut, fends off a demon with the "help" of Jesus, saves a new friend from an escapee from The Ring, and keeps a bunch of rednecks from killing a black guy for being too fly. It is exactly the sort of wild combination of disparate elements I love.
It's a lot of action, with Jesse being mostly irritated she has to deal with all these idiots causing trouble around her, but Rugg and Maruca use that to show her sarcastic teen side. After beating up the cops that tried to bring her to the mayor, she kicks his door in and spends the entire conversation talking through a megaphone she swiped from those cops. While also calling the chief of police a pervert repeatedly. Eh, he probably was. There's a one-page story (where Rugg draws the characters closer to a Little Orphan Annie style) where her friend/sidekick convinces her a baby skeleton is actually a leprechaun skeleton, and Jesse will get a reward for taking it to the hospital.
She does not get a reward. But in a different one-page comic, she gets invited to a birthday party, where she learns about the existence of pinatas and their delightful, sugary innards!
They do sometimes touch on the notion that this is not a great life for Jesse, beyond the gags about Jesse being mad if someone eats her lunch. One story is just Jesse going about her day, hanging out with some of her other friends who live on the street, trying to find some food. That involves her getting embarrassed when a girl from school sees Jesse jump out of a dumpster, and Jesse losing a trucker cap she found in one dumpster, in a different dumpster.
But mostly, it's fighting, and Rugg can vary the presentation of it in a lot of ways. He might have a 3-panel sequence where the first panel shows a cop grabbing Jesse's arm, which flows into the second panel of her other fist clenching, which moves directly into her punching the cop. Or a silent, single image like above. Or a brief sequence of Jesse and another character beating the hell out of each other. Two pages after the splash page above, Rugg gives us a two-page sequence that's just Jesse slaughtering over two dozen guys, with panels scattered across the page, sound effects in 10 different fonts, some of them going backwards across the page, a rocket launcher fired in one panel on the left side of the page, flies clear across the background to explode on the right side of the page. It's excellent work, I'm very jealous.
Rugg and Maruca have done maybe 6 or 7 Street Angel one-shots (released through Image) since this hardcover was released. They're in color, and based on the one I read, it felt like the color takes away the effect of Rugg's shading. But the one I read also didn't have a lot of fighting in it, so maybe it wouldn't have noticed as much during action sequences.
No comments:
Post a Comment