The Gamble Pays Off A Second Time

Book Smart
Kickstart Comics
Jimmy Palmiotti and Justin Gray, writers
Juan Santacruz, artist

My first exposure to Kickstart Comics was with The Book of Lilah. I enjoyed that stand-alone, digest-sized graphic novel so much, I wanted to try some of the company's other offerings. And that has paid off nicely with this book, another stand-alone, digest-sized tome.

I'm already familiar with the writers of Book Smart; the writing team of Palmiotti and Gray is not a sure-thing for my tastes, but when I like a tale they've created, I tend to REALLY like it. And their writing is usually solid, no matter how much interest I end up having in the finished product.

For as much as I enjoyed this book, though, I was unsure about it until about halfway through. It starts off with a young woman in the Himalayas with two native guides. They stumble across a hidden temple, and the two natives attack and rob the young woman, stealing her possessions and leaving her to die in the cold. She doesn't die, however, instead wandering until she is found by a mountain villager who takes her to a hospital in Kathmandu, Nepal. When she wakes up after three days, the young woman does not know who she is or how she came to be in Nepal. Her doctor offers some suggestions for trying to piece together who she is and sends her out into the foreign city where she is immediately attacked by more thugs. Only, this time, she sees the attack coming and single-handedly fights off all of the attackers.

At this point, the book was seeming a little clichéd to me. I already knew the basics of the plot from the description before I bought the book: She's likely a spy or other covert agent, and while she doesn't remember who she is, she can fight quite well. Adding to my dislike were the series' art miscues. The woman on the cover of the book is standing in a typical spy pose, complete with high-tech pistol and is very obviously a dark-haired woman. But the heroine of the story has no gun, doesn't even bother to pick up a gun from one of her dispatched assailants and has brownish, sometimes almost dark blonde hair. It would still be a bad continuity error to confuse the color of the heroine's hair between the cover and interior if there were different artists involved, but when the same artist and colorist work on both the cover and interior, such an error is just sloppy.

The young woman tracks down the hotel she was staying at and learns she checked in under the name Samantha Rayne. Along the way, she picks up a few allies and several more factions wishing her harm. And then, about two-thirds of the way through the book, Palmiotti and Gray throw a twist into the action that not only takes the story in a unique and unexpected direction, but one that makes all previous complaints I had fade away. With one small plot twist, they managed to catch me off-guard, explain the significance of the book's title, renew my faith in the ability of the artists and capture my interest completely. Kudos all around, gentlemen; well done!