Mercy Sparx: Under New Management #1 Free Comic Book Day Edition

This is the first of my purchases/finds from the South Coast Toy & Comic Show in Fairhaven MA a couple of weeks ago. This was one of a stack of old FCBD books that Rubber Chicken Comics had brought and put out on the freebies table.

Title: Mercy Sparx: Under New Management
Issue: #1 (Free Comic Book Day Edition)
Date: May, 2009
Publisher: Devils Due Publishing
Writer: Josh Blaylock
Artist: Matt Merhoff
Colorist: Bill Crabtree
Letterer: Crank!
Cover Art: Tim Seeley, Josh Blaylock

Two pages of text in a very small font are required to fill the reader in on the basic scenario and the happenings in the previous series. And then it takes another four pages of exposition before the story gets started. This could have gotten out of the gate a lot faster and with a lot fewer words.

Mercy Sparx is a, well, essentially a demonic being of some sort, but she's not particularly evil. Just snarky. The main thing she seems to do is to get manipulated into doing other people's dirty work. Dirty work, in this case consisting mostly of tracking down rogue angels and beating them up. With occasional moments of getting beat up by said rogue angels, not to mention suffering the occasional serious beatdown from the various more powerful beings that she works for.

When we finally get to the plot of this issue, Mercy is acting as a messenger for Heaven. Messenger here kind of in the mob sense. So she's got some angel she needs to deliver a message to, but en route she gets jumped by some other angels. A brawl ensues, followed by the seemingly inevitable bondage scene.

I liked the cynical dialogue in this, and the fight scenes were reasonably pretty if occasionally lacking in logic (Mercy gets knocked through a window and into a wall by an angel flying at full speed and gets up swinging, but a single kick puts her lights out a couple of pages later).

But there is a definite vibe that this is a comic that's pretending to be about a strong woman, when really it's a comic about a woman that things happen to, and who is constantly being controlled by (male) beings that she is hopelessly outmatched against. Silly excessively revealing outfits, generic comic-heroine body types, and bondage sequences did little to alter my opinion.

Which is too bad, because there is a lot of fun in the way this is written and there is a lot to like about the artwork. I have a distinct bad gut feeling about the themes I'm reading into this, but I would love for that feeling to be proven wrong.

Rating: 5.5/10