Overall, G.I. Joe: Frontline has been much stronger than the main series, with interesting vignettes from the past and interesting side missions reminiscent of G.I. Joe: Special Missions from the old days. I have to admit that I didn't have much interest in Zanya, daughter of Zartan, but writer Sean McKeever brings his always-strong character development to the story and made me care about the character enough to remain interested, and Francis Portella's artwork is clean and attractive, even in depicting the grungy gang life that Zanya finds herself drawn into.
McKeever's story is a flashback to before the current G.I. Joe story started, and it contains flashbacks within it to earlier in Zanya's childhood. These flashbacks aren't always delineated in an obvious way, but Portella and McKeever do a pretty good job of making the time shifts clear, and the result is a pretty multi-layered exploration of a screwed up young girl. McKeever hits what could be called cliched elements, including an abusive mother and gambling, abusive stepfather, but just because these things are common in stories of hard-knock kids doesn't make them out of place. If anything, Zanya's background and eventual destiny as a high-ranking member of the Dreadnoks justifies this kind of difficult life, right out of a social worker's case nightmare.
What really drives the story is seeing Zanya settle into a family of sorts. McKeever shows us a girl who has never really fit in with family or friends, and whose boyfriend is obviously a jerk who's using her, and then holds out Zartan's approval as something that the girl could legitimately be interested in. What's interesting (and impressive) is that despite Zanya's role as victim in so much of this story, she never comes off as weak or victimized. Instead, she's a strong character throughout, obviously in pain but holding it inside, and the subtletly of her search for a place to fit in and some outward validation of her self is nice.
Honestly, this is a story that non-fans of G.I. Joe could probably get just as much out of as fans. References to Dreadnoks aside, this is pretty much a story of street life and gang life, and McKeever handles it as intelligently and believably as his take on small town life in The Waiting Place or alien culture in The Inhumans. Sure, the characters may have names like Zartan, Monkeywrench and Zanzibar, but McKeever keeps things more grounded than the borderline super-heroic world of G.I. Joe would normally indicate.
Portela is a name that sounds familiar to me, but I can't for the life of me remember why. At any rate, his work here is very nice, reminiscent of the style of Mike Wieringo in some ways. There's a nice cartoony look to it, with plenty of detail and darker shadows to keep it from losing the edge in McKeever's story, and I also detected a little bit of manga storytelling influence. What I mean by manga isn't the big eyes, small mouth elements that people ascribe to manga influence, but his work with the action, which flows nicely and is given a few extra panels so that readers can really get a sense of motion. The fight sequence with Zanya early on in #9 is a particularly good example.
