Date: Mon, 19 Feb 1996 19:49:30 -0400 From: [g--l--n] at [bgnet.bgsu.edu] (Metroplex) Subject: FTP 558 ================================================================================ FIT TO PRINT by catherine yronwode for the week of February 19, 1996 THIS IS FIT TO PRINT NUMBER 558: Some time ago i was given a package of Strange Attractors #1-12 to review. The books have been sitting on my pile, while i've done other things - but today was my lucky day. I have just finished the lot of them and i am not only hooked on the series, i am enthusiastic and effervescent and grateful for being given the opportunity to check them out! This is not rave-of-the month stuff, either, folks; Strange Attractors is rave-of-the-year material. Let me begin with two caveats: you must start at issue#1 (easy enough, because the early issues have been reprinted) and (this is harder) you may have to spend a while getting used to the art. It was the artwork-by turns stiff, confusing, and repetitious, although always displaying nice spotting of blacks and fairly consistent faces-that kept me from reading the series in the first place. Issues 1 - 6 are particularly rugged going. After that things get better. By issues 10 - 12, the art, while still not graceful, is not an embarrassment to the story. And that brings me to the real reason i urge you to pick up Strange Attractors: the story! WOW! That's not all i can say - but wow, what a story! Despite the fact that most of the featured characters are women who zoom around the galaxy, Mark Sherman has not written a "high concept" plot describable by a sentence fragment like "cool babes in space." It is feasible to compare Strange Attractors to the anomalous first part of Love and Rockets where Maggie is a solar mechanic, but Sherman is a better writer than Jaime Hernandez was at that point in his career (we won't discuss the art...) and Strange Attractors is so densely constructed that a description of the premise IS a description of the story. I feel like a kid when i try to explain it, blathering on oblivious to structure or form: You see, there's this young archivist named Sophie who lives and works at the Museum of Lost Things and she's got a little floating robot named Roshi and one day she finds this injured, amnesiac man outside the museum and falls in love with him, and well, to go back a bit, when she was a kid, she was raised in this really wealthy family, where she was the playmate of an older girl named Widow and they were comic book fans and their favourite series were Spicy Space Stories (starring Pirate Peg and the Moon Marauders) and Nurse Nebula, so anyway, when Widow grew up, she actually joined the Rangerettes and went to the Academy and all, but anyway, Meson (that's Sophie's new lover) goes into this hypnotic trance state with an amulet in the Museum and it's like, he gets in touch with Vaad the one-eyed god of Anti-Science, and he ditches Sophie without even saying goodbye and she goes into a really, really bad depression and then, just as she pulls herself together and starts to catalogue Lost Things again, he resurfaces and he's about to marry her best friend Widow Widhover-can you believe that?- and then well, that's just issue #1, actually, and then this gypsy fortune teller shows up, and it's incredible, but Pirate Peg, and the Collector and the rest of the Moon Marauders turn out to have been real women and even the Nurse Nebula romance comics were code about the war between, well, this is complicated, but between V. H. Widhover and the Independents, but anyway, that's just the first really mind-blowing revelation, because then it turns out that one of the Collector's robots videotaped Pirate Peg betraying the Moon Marauders right before they entered Wormhole Junior to attack Sykharak's troops in the Black Boot, and they all got killed in real life, which solves the mystery of why Spicy Space Stories ended, just like it was cancelled, and now Sykharak-the real one, not the comics version-has captured Widow and The Collector has captured Pirate Peg and mind-melded Sophie to a Neural Net Adjudicator and is forcing her to take part in a treason trial of her childhood hero and Sophie's only real hope of figuring out how to get out alive and save her friend Widow is to think really hard-what would Nurse Nebula have done in a situation like this? And that's only up to issue 6. I mean, this is a real story! You get incredible action for your money! Which you should send to RetroGrafix, 67 Emerald St., Suite 623, Keene, NH 03431 at the rate of $2.50 per issue, or $21.00 for issues 1-10, after which you will be as hooked as i am. ==== Fit to Print appears in print each week in Comics Buyers Guide and is available via e-mail. Tell your friends! To subscribe to Fit to Print via e-mail send a request with the words "Subscribe FtP" in the subject header and your address in the body of the message to [g--l--n] at [bgnet.bgsu.edu.] You will be added to the list and receive the next available issue. Back issues are available. FTP to nspace.cts.com and look in the Comics/About Comics/Comics News/Fit to Print directory. FtP is also available on the World Wide Web at http://www.scar.utoronto.ca/~91mithra AND http://www2.csn.net/~searls. Responses are welcome and should be directed to [g--l--n] at [bgnet.bgsu.edu.] Fit to Print is Copyright Cathrine Yronwode. All rights reserved.