I'm still not completely sold on the artwork, but I'm warming up to the story in Hopeless Savages: Ground Zero. This is a much different kind of adventure than the first Hopeless Savages tale, but I am finding some of the same charm in lead character Skankabelle Zero, and Van Meter turns in some moments here worthy of a good 80s romantic comedy movie like Say Anything. It was also a great pleasure to see Christine Norrie handling the kids again, on a terrific flashback sequence, and it's interesting how the humor elements of the book are contrasted with some very real depictions of teenage love and parental strife.
I have to give Van Meter credit for some very clever staging, and O'Malley credit for pulling it off. The story is entirely told in flashback from the point-of-view of Zero's encounter with the school disciplinary board, but within that story there are flashbacks to the earlier years of the Hopeless Savages, a flashback to Zero's night trying to rob the TV van and a couple of other "jumping around in time" moments. It could easily have been a confusing way to tell a story, but instead, thanks to clear storytelling, it adds a bit of variety and flavor to the story.
While I enjoy the storytelling, I'm still not enjoying O'Malley's take on the characters as much as I did Christine Norrie's, and I think I have pinned down why: They all look too young. I'm reminded of Steve Stegelin's Boondoggle, where the style worked because they were all young kids, but when Dirk and Nikki and even the older siblings look about the same age as Zero, there's a bit of cognitive dissonance for me. This is meant to be a story about a teenager, but it looks more like a story about a much younger kid.
However, I also wasn't as sold on the story in the first issue, and that changed about midway through this issue, when Van Meter started the flashback to Zero's first meeting with Ginger. With terrific artwork by Christine Norrie, Van Meter tells the story of Zero's first meeting (and first kindness) with Ginger and gives a funny little story about bullies getting their comeuppance, as well as detailing a little more of what the Hopeless Savage kids were like when they were younger. And from there, the story just kept getting stronger, ending on a high note with one of the most romantic sequences I've ever seen in the comic. Suddenly, I'm completely onboard with the importance of the Zero-Ginger romance, as much as I was the quest for the redemption of Rat or the rescue of Dirk and Nikki in the first series.
While Zero was probably my favorite character in the first Hopeless Savages mini-series, I wasn't really sure that I liked her enough to enjoy this much of a focus on the character to the exclusion of the others. However, with this issue, Van Meter has begun to turn me around on this plot, and though O'Malley's artwork still isn't clicking on all cylinders for me, the storytelling in general was also a fair bit clearer in this issue.
