In the end, if you asked me what I thought of Hopeless Savages: Ground Zero, I'm going to tell you that I like all the Hopeless Savages stories and that it was fun seeing all the family members again. But I can't deny that O'Malley's artwork, while something I might like on other books, just didn't fit with what I was looking for in the book, and it's not always the clearest thing in the world. Ground Zero falls into that unfortunate rule that the sequel is never as good as the original, but I did enjoy seeing more of Zero Hopeless-Savage growing up, and I got a big kick out of the "TV Special" segments of the issue.
My big complaint on the book really does come down to the artwork. The big moments, the important storytelling, is made clear for the most part, but the smaller details, and the lead-up to those moments, I'm not entirely certain I got, because I couldn't always make them out. For example, I'm still not entirely sure what went on that got Ginger and Zero in such trouble, and that's largely down to being unable to make out who's who a lot of the time. Zero's friends, in particular, blend into one amorphous mass for me. And I missed the subtle storytelling that Norrie had that could convey the characters' emotions more clearly in the first series.
Norrie wasn't completely absent this issue, though, and I loved her work on the television special sequences. Though the choice to use random speech balloons made it kind of hard to follow who was saying what, I did enjoy getting this sort of turbo-backstory using the TV medium, and Norrie really captures Dirk and Nikki's wilder days.
Van Meter's story this time out was focused largely on Zero, and I finally did warm to that by the end. The troubled romance between Ginger and Zero had a sweetness and difficulty to it that reminded me of the best teen love story movies I saw in the 1980s, and by the end of the story I was really rooting for the two of them to get together, as much as I was rooting for Rat to reclaim his roots in the first mini. Though I was at first a little concerned that the other family members were left out of the story, by the end I was a little annoyed when screen time was taken away from Zero, such as with the Twitch's reunion on the porch, featuring a relationship that hadn't really been fleshed out that much during the story, and thus didn't really resonate with me.
I did enjoy the relationship between Zero and her mother, though, as it felt like an important part of the main story. In addition to the parallels in their early lives and the tie-in there to the flashback, the mother-daughter battles are something that is an all-too-common experience, and it helped to make this unusual family seem a little more easy to relate to. So yeah, if you asked me how I liked Ground Zero, I'm going to say I didn't like it as much as the first one. But I'm still looking forward to the next one.
