FALSE PROPHET !

“Dad never found any monsters under my bed. He was looking in the wrong place.”

Tomboy: Volumes #1-4

Tomboy #10 (Action Lab)

I’ve spoken about this comic before. At length. It’s one of the comics that Jenna and Nate and I used to talk about quite a bit when we were doing Nerdcouver, and there’s a damn good reason: this comic is excellent.

Tomboy is a giant mash-up of magical girl tropes with detective and crime stories, a tale of corporate corruption of politicians having the unexpected consequence of producing a magical girl who is utterly lethal in her application of justice. She’s caused bloody havoc as she cuts through one conspiracy after another, not really understanding more than the surface of what’s going on but being drawn to the misery the people she loves suffer and finding those immediately responsible while the people who call the shots escape her, time and again.

Mia Goodwin has been weaving an incredibly complex story about life and death and fate, about corruption and madness and magic. It’s about the loss of innocence and the peculiar pain that only family can inflict, about how sometimes there is no way out when the people you love are dying all around you.

And, yes, there’s an interesting and detailed mythology about where the power came from and what the cost of it is, but this is really a story about the horrors an older generation is inflicting upon the younger, about the hopelessness and agony that the younger is inheriting. We have some answers already, and we know this is going to end in tragedy – there’s no other way for this story to end. 

Tomboy #3 , cover by Mia Goodwin