I've got to hand it to Lance Parkin; for high concepts, Miranda is tough to beat. A girl from the twentieth century is pulled billions of years into the future to become the empress of an impossibly huge star empire, and soon discovers that she's at the heart of interstellar politics with a price on her head. The concept is huge, but the execution is on a smaller, more personal level, both in terms of art and story, and the results are pretty good. I read a lot of comics, so finding something unexpected is always a treat, and Miranda was definitely that.
One of the things that Parkin and Bednar really did right was to grab my right in the first couple of pages. Parkin does some fantastic work on Miranda's dialogue, painting her as a normal girl with a sense of humor about the whole thing, and painting her as open-minded enough to accept all this science-fiction weirdness but not so jaded that she can't convey the awe as the point-of-view character. The opening sequence is a really stellar example of how to transition a reader gently but quickly from familiar circumstances to a very unusual premise, all with a touch of gentle humor.
After Miranda gets to the future, the story pacing slows down a bit, but it's still a solid read. Parkin's world-building is reminiscent of Alexandro Jodorowsky, with an enormous sense of scale in terms of time and space. The ship has a crew of thousands, the army is made up of various unusual blends of technology and martial training, the homeworld is enormous and man-made and the destruction that caused the formation of the empire took place on an unimaginably huge scale. Parkin blends this enormous sense of scale with a personal point-of-view and cute character moments, including Miranda's trouble with clothes and assassins. I also quite liked the small and focused supporting cast, which helps keep the whole thing manageable despite the potential size of the story.
Allan Bednar's artwork is a little bit more of a mixed bag for me. He definitely has some skills, and some of his technological designs for the ship, the assassin robot and the skywardens are beautiful to look at. At the same time, some of the technology looks a little plain, such as the first glimpse of The Needle, and a little more consistency in the amount of detail on the characters' faces wouldn't have hurt either. I'm also not convinced that the color spread was a great idea, as it is jarring, and the artwork actually looks much better in black and white. Despite a few quibbles, however, overall I thought Bednar's work was pretty solid, especially when he's doing more work with shadows as on the first page or in the panel that introduces the notion of the destroyers of the universe.
Miranda is an indy gem that could easily have slipped under my radar. I'm happy that it didn't, because it's a neat science-fiction concept with great characterization and promising artwork, and well worth seeking out.
