The Variants #1 // Review
A routine investigation should be perfectly normal. A private investigator should be able to handle just about anything that a client throws at her. What happens when she gets tossed a few different versions of herself? It’s anything but routine, as Jessica finds out in the first issue of The Variants. The new Jessica Jones mystery makes its debut at the end of June, written by Gail Simone. Artist Phil Noto brings the mystery to the page with style, beauty, and precision. Jones’s charm slides across the page in a clever tumble that makes a magnetic opening to the new five-part series.
Jessica Jones is a bit scattered. She’s staring into the window of a coffee house. Then she’s trying on a million different shades of lipstick. There’s an altercation that can only be resolved when a certain blind lawyer in crimson swings in to help her out. It’s going to cost her, though. He wants her to be there to talk to a victim of the same guy who messed with her head a lifetime ago. And now there’s some question as to whether or not the phantom of Killgrave is still crawling around in her skull. That’s the least of her worries when she runs into another version of herself in her own apartment.
Simone deals with a classic bit of surrealist story that’s been around in comics for decades, literature for a hell of a lot longer than that, and folklore since the dawn of time. (There’s a reason why the Germans have a word for “doppelgänger.” It’s a fun concept.) The first issue takes some time to build up to the big reveal at the end. Simone is doing some heavy-duty work with the theme of uncertainty. 20% of the way into the series and already there are like...half a dozen different mind games being played on reader and protagonist alike.
Noto’s art is precise, but it’s also illuminated by an endearingly beautiful psycho-emotional perspicacity. Emotions are overwhelmingly vivid on Jess’s face. The kinetic feel of action might feel very static in places, but violence is no less brutal than it would be in more aggressively dynamic art. Noto’s style matches Jess’s personality perfectly. The action is a casual afterthought while the details of the mystery come across in living, breathing emotional detail. All that detail hits the page in just the right amount, too. Noto seems to know exactly the right amount of background to throw into a panel in order to bring across the atmosphere without weighing down the page. It all feels so fresh.
And so a private detective is thrown into the kind of weirdness that has become the hallmark of various different incarnations of the Marvel Universe. The clever bit about the weirdness is that Simone never lets Jessica Jones stop being Jessica Jones, even when the weird sets in. Run into a perfect copy of herself in her own apartment? Doesn’t matter if it IS her, she’s going to beat the hell out of herself for trespassing on her own home. Simone has a brilliant grasp of Jess. This is going to be fun.
