There are two words that come to mind when trying to describe Bombaby: Beautiful and unusual. The former refers to the artwork, which looks painted and reminds me of nothing so much as the best work of Kyle Baker. The latter has to do with the subject matter and approach, which presents us with astral travel, daydreaming, arranged marriage, parents and sisters and never quite gels into telling the reader what the book is about. Certainly I was intrigued by Bombaby, but I kept wondering if my unfamiliarity with the stories of Bollywood were making me miss some obvious parallels that would have made the book more clear to me, or if Mazzotta's first issue is just a little bit too vague and indistinct to grab me right off the bat. At any rate, while I'm mostly confused, I'm also interested, and I'll be curious to see where the story goes from here.
Given the title and what little I do know about Bollywood movies, I was expecting Bombaby to be sort of a bizarre spectacle, but while it is unusual, it's actually fairly subdued. Sure, the protagonist astral projects herself into the middle of some sort of shady exchange featuring a briefcase, guns, limos and knives, but the actual amount of weirdness remains at a somewhat low level. There are definitely hints that more is going on than meets the eye, though, with the assassin treating the girl as some sort of goddess and the girl's powers being as mysterious to her as they are to the reader.
While Mazzotta hints at what's going on, however, he doesn't really provide a lot in the way of answers in this first issue, or even much in the way of foundation. We learn the basics, that Indian story chestnut that Sangeeta is a young girl betrothed to a man she doesn't much care for that her parents do like, but there are a lot more questions that remain. What did Sangeeta intercept? Where do these powers come from? What's in the briefcase? These questions only scratch the surface, and while there's certainly room for Mazzotta to give satisfactory answers, this felt a little bit light and uninformative for an untested first issue from a new creator, and seems like it might have some trouble hooking an audience out of an already-flooded comics market.
The story may be a little bit on the light side, but the artwork is Bombaby's secret weapon. Mazzotta's work is beautiful to behold, whether it's the exotic purple, orange and green lighting on the action sequences or the softer, white and paler greens that define the look of Sangeeta's regular world. His work has a lot of energy to it, and the stylized characters remind me of animation, very expressive and great for giving the illusion of motion on the printed page. If I had to draw comparisons, it would be to the work of Phil Noto or Kyle Baker.
Bombaby is a beautiful book to look at, and it's unusual subject matter certainly makes it worth a look. However, the first issue doesn't provide enough of a strong hook for my taste, and I hope that future issues will either have more substance or, if the substance is in the similarities to Bollywood, will make any parallels to that form of cinema more clear for readers who might not already know of it.
