Rating: WORTHY!
I found this in the library and liked the first volume so much that I went right back and got the next three, which is all the library had. Bless that library! I was hoping that this is the whole set because this was initially issued as a relatively short run of individual (and indie published) comics, and later collected into sets, but it turns out there are six of them, each containing five of the original issues: Moon Lake, Atomic Dreams, Desert Run, Collider, Black Hole, The Last Day. How he got it to be exactly 30- issues is a bit of as poser - that's like writing a novel and deciding it's going to be exactly three hundred pages long regardless of how you tell the story and whether it naturally ends on page three hundred! However, as I write this I'm half way through and I can't fault it for being too fast or too drawn-out.
The art work is excellent, but note that it's black and white line drawings, no coloring involved. Once in a while the text is too small, which is a pet peeve of mine, but other than that, I can't fault this at all, so it all came down to the usual test, for me: whether the story was any good, of course. For me the story is the most important thing, with art being secondary, and this story did not fail me.
The main character is Julie Martin, typically curvaceous as comic book females are, but not improbably so. I liked her sister better - she was drawn more realistically and looked pretty damned good, especially since her personality was adorable. And in the end that's what overcame the skin-deep appearance of these female characters - they were realistic, all three of the main ones.
Julie is a down-and-out photographer whose husband has ditched her for reasons which were not exactly clear to me. She's not happy with this, but she's just about dealing with it, and trying to work on her photography portfolio. Evidently her starboard-folio is already completed....
This is how she happens to be in the desert in the south-west (note that North America sports many Moon Lakes!) when a new flying suit is tested - one that bonds to the skin. It's being tested by a woman Named Annie, and the air-force considers the test to be a success and orders the destruction of the suit, with Annie still in it. This causes a literal rain of particles which come down rather like hailstones, but which are soft, like they're made from modeling clay. They cover Julie and stick to her skin, and to her truck.
'She evacuates the area quickly, but soon discovers these hailstones are, in a way, alive. They begin to flatten out and stretch, and cover her skin, eventually forming a breast plate - literally. It covers her neck, upper chest, and breasts rather provocatively, like a prototype designer swimsuit top. It's not like a piece of metal armor - it's more like a thin coat of chrome. The doctor who Julie visits cannot remove it, and actually is injured by it. Julie is tossed out of the ER as a prankster.
The air force is now trying to recover all the pieces from the explosion, but can find less that 30% of them. They discover that two people were in the area - a vagrant, and Julie. They just don't know the identity of these two people two begin with. A woman with the cool name of Ivy Raven, who is an expert at tracking down people and reading crime scenes - this woman is observant and sharp - is called in to find Julie, but she isn't told the whole story.
There are several interested parties, including a park ranger named Dillon Murphy who is the boyfriend of Annie, the original test pilot. He eventually encounters Julie when the army try to arrest her, and end up all knocked out due to some explosive power of Julie's breastplate which evidently triggers when she's stressed. Now she and Dillon are on the run with Ivy in hot pursuit.
I wasn't thrilled that Julie had to end up with Ranger Rick (or Dill) - yet another woman in distress who evidently can't make it without a guy to validate her, but the characters were written realistically (they even have realistic names! LOL!), and behaved appropriately, and there was no ridiculous love at first sight, so I let that problem slide in this case. Plus, it's Julie who actually gets them out of various scrapes with her "super-power", so this balanced out. Overall, I rated this a worthy read and I was looking forward to volume two at the end of this one.
