Chaotic Kiss Book Two

I actually bought this at the Free Comic Book Day festival last year, but since Michelle Pinard was at yesterday's Queen City Kamikaze, I figured I would feature it as today's review. This will be all for convention-related comics from this weekend. I attended Boskone today, but purchased only a couple of prose books. I also got to meet the editors of Fat Girl In A Strange Land, an anthology that debuted this weekend which includes a story I wrote!

Back to the New 52 tomorrow!

Title: Chaotic Kiss
Issue: Book Two
Date: 2012
Publisher: MKT Productions
Writer: Michelle Pinard
Artist: Michelle Pinard

Michelle Pinard's geeky transgendered soap opera returns with more drama, more plot twists, and a lot more geekiness.

It's the geeky elements that are the real fun for me with this book. The intrigue and plot twists are complex and engaging, and writer/artist Michelle Pinard does a great job of incorporating the unique challenges and struggles of her transgendered protagonists in a way that stays hopeful and never gets too angry or preachy.

But it's the geek culture elements that really make me smile when I read Chaotic Kiss. In this issue, we've got a Halloween cosplay ball (complete with a Cinderella-flavored romantic moment), a viewing of Rocky Horror Picture Show ("What the hell does this 'V' mean?" HA!), a video game tournament, and a maid cafe. Plus plenty of cosplay, corsetry, and goth-lolita fashion.

The plot focuses primarily on Yujiko, who is still transitioning and is in an emotionally abusive relationship, and Syd, who decides that even though Halloween is approaching, it's time to play cupid.

Subplots abound, although there was one bit of plot that seemed to get dropped without explanation (a character who was angry with another character, and then things were normal between them without explanation; small in the overall scheme, but it did have me scratching my head).

A lot of the characters in this are rather over-the-top, but that is intentional and very much part of the fun.

This was a thoroughly entertaining follow-up to the first volume and it leaves plenty of story potential for Book 3.

Rating: 7/10