The first Hopeless Savages mini-series was one of my favorite releases of last year, and I was anxiously awaiting this follow-up, despite the total change of artists. Unfortunately, while the writing is as solid as ever, the artwork didn't really click with me in this first issue, and while I love Zero, I'm missing the rest of the cast, who seem to have slid into the background a bit in this follow-up mini. The story is still intriguing, and Zero is as fun as ever, but I didn't get the charge that I did out of each issue of the first mini-series with this issue.
Whereas the first Hopeless Savages was something of an action/comedy road trip, Ground Zero seems to be a coming-of-age romantic comedy, and while this is certainly not an overexposed genre in comics, it isn't really my favorite genre. Zero's troubles at school with boys are done up in a style that is sympathetic and believable, but not as wholly unusual and funny as the situations that were at the heart of Hopeless Savages. With that said, though, the mixture of innocence and cynicism that is the appeal of Zero's character comes through in her approach to boys, and her desire to go on a real date is as charming as her easy method of dealing with the sex-crazed boys who want to take advantage of her.
One of the other appealing and entertaining aspects of Skank Zero is her tendency to make up words, and though it did sometimes make her a little hard to understand in this issue, it remains a charming and funny affectation. I also found her hot temper and general frustration with simple-minded or small-minded people to be something most of us can relate to at any given time, and though I've never been a teenage girl, that one element of the story made it a lot easier for me to empathize with Zero.
However, I found the artwork in this issue to be a disappointment, a letdown not only compared to Christine Norrie's fantastic work on the first mini-series but compared to O'Malley's other work on the Oni website. The book is drenched in black ink and short on detail, and I sometimes had difficulty telling the characters apart, which made the story hard to read. In addition, since plenty of the humor in Hopeless Savages is physical slapstick, it's important that the art is able to carry that off, and I felt that O'Malley missed the boat on that this time out. Andi Watson's flashback sequence is perfect for the tone of the flashback and gorgeous as always, but the bulk of the art is not up to those standards.
Given my enjoyment of the first series, I had high hopes (and high expectations) for this second one, and so I'm more disappointed than I might be in an uneven issue of an ongoing or a new title that I didn't have such high hopes for. However, while the artwork really let me down and the story didn't grab me as much as the first Hopeless Savages tale did, Van Meter has more than earned my interest for a few more issues, and my hope is that O'Malley will live up to the potential I've seen in his other work in future issues of the series.
