Mary Jane & Black Cat #2 // Review
Felicia and Mary Jane are at a job interview. In hell. (It’s okay: they’re getting a meal out of it, and hell has come to New York, so there isn’t a very long commute.) The demon Belasco wants Black Cat’s skills as a thief. There was a time when this sort of thing would have had Felicia in over her head, but she’s been to hell recently, and it’s nothing she can’t handle. Things ARE going to get pretty sophisticated pretty quickly, though, as Mary Jane & Black Cat enters its second issue. Writer Jed MacKay and artist Vincenzo Carratù continue a new adventure with a couple of old friends that continue to be hugely entertaining. Color bathes the page courtesy of Brian Reber.
A soulsword. That’s what Belasco wants. It’s the only way he can truly rule over his own hell (which happens to be a place called Limbo). The sword in question has been hidden by gods of another realm in The Screaming Tower: a place crawling with traps and horrors which hide its prize. They’ll be competing for the sword with devils from heaven, a group from Hydra, and others. Black Cat would prefer it if she didn’t have to risk Mary Jane’s life in the process. The good news is that she’s got powers now, so she can protect herself. The bad news is that the powers in question are totally unpredictable.
MacKay has a delicious rhythm worked out between the two leads. He’s savvy enough with their history together to weave together a sharp connection between the two of them as he’s thrusting them into a realm of weird magic that will plunge everything into very strange directions as the series continues. The dialogue is as sharp as MacKay’s handling of Marvel lore, which weaves together a few different elements from diverse corners of the Marvel Universe and ties them together in a way that feels fresh and interesting as the series continues.
Carratù centers the art in a way that keeps an intimate lock on emotion. The rapport between Felicia and Mary Jane has a very engagingly emotional quality about it that does a lot to draw in the reader. The strange mix of earthbound contemporary reality and the realm of hell feels well-rendered thanks to the visual reality that Carratù manages to conjure to the page. Belasco has a charismatic presence onstage. The fantasy that he’s catapulting at the page feels big and imposing in a huge way. Reber casts the visual world of the series in a clever mood mired in the blood, shadow, and hellfire of Limbo.
The series reaches its mid-point next month. MacKay and company have rigidly defined the parameters of the rest of the series by the end of the second issue. There seems to be more than enough magic around the edges of the story to maintain the possibility of the unexpected sneaking up on the narrative from a number of different directions. It’s neat. It’s tidy. And it’s got just the right amount of chaos woven into its heart.
