Spectra #3

Third in this educational series from the American Physical Society. Picked this one up a couple of weeks back at the National Conference on Science Education.

Title: Spectra
Issue: 3
Publisher: American Physical Society
Date: 2011
Writer: Rebecca Thompson
Artist: Kerry G. Johnson, David Ellis, Nancy Bennett-Karasik
Colorist: Kerry G. Johnson

There's a new physics teacher at Nikola Tesla Junior High School (!), and it's the uncle of Lucinda's best friend Ruby. He's known as General Leslie J. Relativity, and he's an ex-military man who hands out sets of pushups to students who aren't up to speed on the theory of gravity.

He's also involved in some secret experiments, and when he discovers Lucinda's laser superpowers, he's eager to have her change into Spectra to test his theories about the effects on light of the gravity extremes of white and black holes.

Lucinda, meanwhile, is hoping to escape from the gravity experiment in time to make it to a school dance.

This story is not as coherent as it could be. There is a seemingly random obstacle course of physics-related traps that the heroes need to overcome at the end, and it doesn't really have rhyme or reason for existing. General Relativity (I see what you did there.) is also a bit unclear in his intentions and motivations.

That being said, I still enjoyed the interaction between the characters, and the book continues to do a nice job of portraying a female superhero. Just the fact that it is consistently passing the Bechtel test and isn't turning Lucinda into a sex object is a nice change from, well, just about everything that the major publishers do. Physics idea continue to be scattered in, not to the point of drowning the story in educational content, but enough so that you can learn some facts and have a few concepts reenforced by reading the comic.

Rating: 6/10