When you put Darwyn Cooke on covers and Christine Norrie on partial interiors, you've got my attention. Unfortunately, Bad Girls #1 has no Norrie artwork yet, and the Cooke cover sums up the story pretty effectively, much more effectively than Vance and Graves do in their 22-page comic. There's a neat central idea to the genesis of the super-powers in this comic, and Vance is almost there in conveying a realistic high school dynamic, but the former has some clarity problems and the latter seems a little stilted and unrealistic. That pretty much sums up the first issue of Bad Girls for me: Lots of potential, good in spots, but ultimately flawed.
Vance sets up a likable pair of protagonists in Lauren and Ronald. Thanks to the heaviest use of thought balloons I've seen in modern comics for quite some time, we get inside Lauren's head quite a bit, and her conflicting desires for popularity and to be a nice person ring true. She comes off as more than a little shallow, but still likable, and she's a pretty believable teenage girl. Ronald, on the other hand, comes right out of the Peter Parker school, and in fact his story follows every nerd cliche that has been set forth in super-hero comics and animation since Stan Lee's age. While Vance does go overboard with his bullies and his bad girls, though, turning them into exaggerated cartoons, there's enough truth to the notion of bullying and cliques that I can almost get past it.
My biggest problem with Bad Girls #1 is that it's so predictable, in general. And yet, Vance subverts that at some points in the story, showing the potential to rise above the cliche and the expected. His observation of teen behavior, with a variety of "Why can't I be cool like everybody else?" thought balloons, is dead-on, and I like that Lauren gets to reverse her status quo with the popular girls, even as she wonders if she's selling herself out by doing so. That's a more interesting story than just having her fall in with the nerd clique, which is what I would have expected.
The really neat idea in the story, though, is one that is not real clear and which remains mostly a background element. Ronald either invents or discovers (it's not entirely clear, thanks to some weird coloring and rushed storytelling) a substance which will give people powers. Female people, specifically, as it doesn't seem to last in men. Thus, when the popular girls become the Bad Girls, it really is up to Lauren to take up the powers and oppose them. Given that super-heroes are often a male power fantasy, it's a neat twist to make it something that only women can make use of.
Graves and Lee Loughridge put in a frustrating art performance on Bad Girls. Frustrating because it's so good at times, and so close to being good throughout, but it suffers from considerable problems. For one thing, Lee's palette looks too dark, a problem he suffered with on some of his Catwoman work as well, giving what should be a realistic high school setting a surreal, dream-like appearance. For another, Graves sometimes falls down in the storytelling department, although you have to cut her some slack in considering that Vance may not be telling the whole story sometimes. Most notably, the "purple" water that appears with no explanation left me wondering, especially given the bullies' words, if it was in fact just water ... until Ronald goes back for some at the end. The crucial question of where the powers come from seems more vague than the creators intended, at least so far.
