After the first issue of My Faith in Frankie, I thought I had it pretty well figured out where Carey was going, but he throws a few big curveballs into the second issue, and now I don't really have any idea. Which I like, even if I do feel like he's sort of taken the story away from Frankie a little bit in terms of her choices and put the focus more squarely on Jeriven and matters of the spiritual and godly. At any rate, though, the story remains unpredictable and fun, with a light touch that doesn't contradict its adult sensibilities, a lot of really fun characters and one hell of a great central concept.
I can't quite figure out who My Faith in Frankie is about. Frankie, Jeriven, Kay, Dean? They're all major players, and while the obvious protagonists are Frankie and Jeriven, Kay and Dean both play pretty crucial roles as well. Kay's role as narrator marks her as more important than the story lets on, and given the way this issue ends, I suspect that she's about to become much more deeply involved. At the same time, Frankie's growth from young girl to young woman makes for fascinating reading, as does Jeriven's inevitable change as a god when his only worshipper makes that transition. As for Dean, well, he gets one of the most significant changes in this issue.
Without wanting to give too much away, it becomes clear in this issue that Dean is not at all what he appeared to be. On one level, this disappointed me, because the setup in the first issue was one of godly love versus earthly love, a nice theme that could play out in this fantasy setting, but Carey has transformed it instead into more of a good versus evil thing, uncomplicating it considerably. However, Dean's arrogance and casual interaction with the forces of darkness was actually kind of fun, and if that's the role he's going to be playing, it certainly won't be less entertaining.
Carey does a lot of really fun stuff with the spiritual aspects of the story. Jeriven's attempts to impress Frankie are hilarious, and the advice of one of his godly parents ("Hast thou ever done it as a swan?") cracked me up as well. Even Dean's role in the story, which is certainly a bit on the dark side, has a lot of funny moments in it, thanks to the way he treats his home and its inhabitants with such casual disregard.
As with the first issue, the artwork is beautiful. Liew and Hempel present an off-kilter look at Earth, a heaven and a hell that shares a goofy sensibility with Carey's script, but never descends into outright silliness. There's real passion (and no doubt, real pain) to be found in the Frankie-Dean relationship, and it's hard not to care for Jeriven's hurt feelings when Liew and Hempel give him this wounded puppy look to go with his naive understanding of the mortal world. My Faith in Frankie is an unpredictable, off-beat look at love and religion, a very different type of story than the ones we're used to seeing from Carey's Lucifer but just as good, if not better, than those tales.
