Electric Girl. Written and drawn by Michael Brennan. Pub. Mighty Gremlin, 2000. Softcover, B&W, 160 pages. $9.95 USA, $15.00 Canada. ISBN# 0-9703555-0-5.

AUDIENCE: All ages; there’s no sex or foul language. A small amount of cartoon violence. Gross-looking walking dead appear in one story.

SYNOPSIS: 19-year-old Virginia is the “electric girl,” born with strange powers such as the ability to disrupt electrical machinery and to recharge batteries with a touch. Her powers are mostly under control, although she sometimes unintentionally shocks people. Virginia lives an ordinary life with her college-professor father and her often absent mother, going to school and hanging out with her friends. She has a squatty little dog, Blammo. Oh, and she is haunted by a gremlin named Oogleeoog, who no one else can see or hear.

There are thirteen different stories in the book, of various lengths, the first of which is “the origin of the electric girl.” (The rest are untitled.) The origin story opens with a trio of gremlins discussing their work: causing trouble for humans. One gremlin thinks the quality of Oogleeoog’s mischief is slipping, but Oogleeoog ignores him and goes to a maternity ward. The next baby born is a girl who, to the surprise of the new parents and the obstetrician, gives off electric shocks. It is unclear whether the gremlin actually caused baby Virginia’s abnormality, but he then proceeds to sabotage all attempts by the obstetrician to bring in a specialist. The baby goes home with no unusual notations on her record, and Oogleeoog proudly reveals to another gremlin that this girl is his long-term project.

Fast forward nineteen years to the next story. Virginia wants to go out clubbing with her friends, but Oogleeoog causes Blammo to slip his leash and Virginia has to hunt all through the city for him. She ends up in the deranged playhouse of four-year-old Timmy, who’s a genius inventor. The playhouse is full of remote control devices, giant toys, and even a talking dog, all devised by Timmy. But Timmy throws a tantrum and begins siccing his toys on Virginia. Several battles ensue, and while she can use her powers to disrupt some of the devices, she needs help from Oogleeoog and the talking dog before the conflict is over.

The next major (longer than 12 pages) story is also facilitated by Blammo, when he runs away down a dark alley and returns happily carrying a severed hand in his mouth. It turns out the hand belongs to Dale, a walking corpse who has returned to seek vengeance for his death. Virginia and her friend Monique agree to help him. (OK, so I lied in the summary paragraph, she doesn’t battle him.) The third major story is about an experimental robot being developed at the college Virginia attends. The robot apparently senses that Virginia is an electrical power source, and begins to act as if it is infatuated with her. The only one who’s upset by this is Professor Flosznik, the robot’s creator, who jealously accuses Virginia of trying to steal the robot. (I lied again, Virginia doesn’t battle the robot either.) The remainder of the stories are similarly varied, including a humid-day-in-the-life when fuses blow wherever Virginia goes, an encounter with a militant animal-rights activist who also has strange powers, fixing the dead battery of a stranger’s car, a convenience store robbery, and Virginia’s nightmare about standing trial for murder (after having accidentally electrocuted Leonardo di Caprio in her dream). Two of the stories are set in Virginia’s childhood.

There is a second volume available, Electric Girl (vol 2) (but I haven’t read it yet), and an associated website at www.electricgirl.com.

EVALUATION: Brennan’s brushwork is a pleasure to look at. It’s more stylized and cartoony than most GNs (occasionally almost as abstract as a Picasso) but he has an assured line and never fails to express the proper character, emotion and place. You always know where you are: for example, a kitchen backdrop is characterized by dishes in a dish drainer, accomplished in just a few lines. Brennan has a great grasp of perspective, and is one of the best clothes-drawers I’ve seen in comics — blue jeans fold and t-shirts wrinkle just where they should (and watch for the 1980’s teen fashions on Virginia’s cousins in one of the stories from her childhood). One weakness in Brennan’s art is a difficulty in depicting darkness and night scenes vs. daylight scenes; at the beginning of the walking corpse story, I didn’t realize it was supposed to be nighttime until Virginia remarked, “There’s no way that I’m gonna go in there at this time of night!” And it wasn’t until the seventh page of the story that a cityscape with a moon in a black sky convinced me that it truly was night. Brennan’s use of zip-a-tones is very sparing until the last story, except for “the origin of the electric girl,” which I gather was drawn after the rest of the stories. This seems to show improvement in Brennan’s art, for the awareness of lighting (and use of tones to achieve it) is much better in the origin story.

The page layouts are traditional and support the story well. The action is mostly easy to follow. I did get confused in one of the battles with Timmy’s toys; it’s unclear to me how Virginia managed to stop the RC airplanes. A single panel shows her using Blammo’s leash as a sort of lasso around one of the planes, with a little lightning bolt suggesting that she’s conducting electricity to the plane (through a cloth leash?). But if she’s just using the leash to conduct electricity, then why must it wrap around the plane? This panel would have been better broken out into a sequence of several panels. But all in all, the stories are easy to read, even the two or three delightful pieces which feature dialog balloons filled with pictures and glyphs instead of words. (I love those, it seems to me that wordless stories are the acme of sequential art.)

Despite the assurance of the gremlin, in the first story, that he has a master plan for causing mischief, there’s no overall story arc in the book. All the stories are completely independent of each other. Character development is absent, since there’s no arrow of plot to follow showing growth or change in Virginia or those around her. On the other hand, there’s plenty of characterization — all the characters in the story are developed as much as is appropriate for their roles. I especially liked the way Virginia’s parents’ relationship is elucidated through the dialog between them. A catty remark here, an argument there, and in surprisingly few panels scattered throughout the book we are given a good picture of their household dynamics.

Personally, I found the gremlin an annoying character. I shouldn’t hold it against him, I suppose: it’s his nature to cause trouble. But I liked best the stories in which he had a minimal presence. It was hinted in the book that there is a set of rules gremlins have to follow, and Oogleeoog is trying to keep Virginia from finding out about them. Hopefully, future stories will explore this further, and tie up the other loose ends from the origin story (such as, why did Oogleeoog need to prevent the pediatric specialist from learning about baby Virginia?).