Before Watchmen: Silk Spectre #1 Review
Meet Laurel Jane Jupiter, the girl who will grow up to be the Silk Spectre.
Before Watchmen: Silk Spectre #1
Laurel Jane is the daughter of Sally Jupiter, the original Silk Spectre. Laurie grows up under a strict roof that finds constant training by Sally to protect her from the evils of the world. She doesn’t have friends, and most certainly does NOT have a boyfriend. There’s no time for that with what Sally has planned for her. When Sally’s true past as a sex symbol is revealed by some mean girls at Laurie’s school, the teenager decides to run away with her new boyfriend, Greg. They get picked up by hippies for parts unknown.
Darwyn Cooke returns just one week after he kicked off the Before Watchmen with Minutemen #1. This time, he’s only co-scripting the story with the other writer and artist Amanda Conner. Frankly, I found myself especially enjoying this book. Cooke, so far, is doing a decent job with the books he’s taken on during this project. However, the addition of Conner, you get something a little different. Whenever I pick up a book done by Conner, I have a pre-conceived notion that it’s going to be fun. She has a way of visually representing her characters in a way that is cute and personable. It’s cartoonish, like some of the inner images Laurie has when things happen around her, but it’s a fun book to look at. If you pay attention to how Conner uses facial expressions, it often times comes off as almost more realistic than cartoonish. Those expressions capture the moments between moments that we see in everyone’s faces from time to time.
To have an artist with Conner’s reputation for “cheesecake” on this book is a good move. We might be focusing more on a teenage girl for the story, but sometimes the cheesecake can work in a different way to reveal a more cutesy innocence in a girl that will grow up so jaded and angry. I don’t expect this book to reveal much to us in the bigger scope of the Watchmen story as a whole, but I do look forward to seeing where this goes because we only know that jaded and angry woman. I’m almost thinking I’m looking more forward to the subsequent issues of this series than anything else. This book is much more innocent in this opening. The other books are playing with characters that most of us believe we know all there is to them and don’t necessarily need anything else. Silk Spectre, on the other hand, almost appears to have fun telling a story with a different perspective with names we recognize.
With all this taken into consideration, I’m going to make a bold prediction that this will be the most liked of all the prequels. Considering this was a book I wasn’t sure how excited I was for, I dearly enjoyed it.
A COMIC BOOK BLOG RATING
| Pros | Cons |
|---|---|
| Fun, cute and interesting. Solid script and great art from Cooke and Conner respectively. Perhaps the most entertaining of all the prequels we may see in this event. | I can’t really say too much negatively. I’m pleasantly surprised by how much I liked this book. |
| Rating |
1 Comment
I simply loved this book. I was a bit skeptical when DC thought to revive the Watchmen series, but I really liked the way the series has been brought together, so far.