Finally for this week, we have Burnout, which kicks off the second wave of digests from DC's Minx imprint. 

As you almost certainly know, Minx is meant to draw in teenage girls by offering a sort of comic book equivalent of the young adult novel.  Despite the packaging, it's not English-language manga.  The hope, presumably, is to offer the comics-receptive teenage audience a domestic alternative to manga, instead of a domestic imitation.  In practice, this has tended to mean digest versions of the sort of comic that Oni used to put out five years ago.  That might explain why Minx is aimed at teenage girls, but reviewed mainly by adult men.  Like me.

Burnout is the first comic by Rebecca Donner, one of various novelists who've contributed to the imprint.  It's an unusual story, which starts off as a teen romance and then wanders off elsewhere.  There's a lot going on in here, and I'm not entirely convinced that the book makes all of those elements work.  Still, there's no denying that it's ambitious.

Danni and her recently-divorced mother have moved to a small logging town in Oregon, and end up moving in with mom's new alcoholic boyfriend.  There, Danni falls in love with her prospective stepbrother Haskell, who turns out to be a devoted environmentalist and eco-saboteur.  (The story prefers the term eco-terrorist, but that's probably pushing it.)  Danni soon ends up drawn into his one-man campaign.

The interesting, and welcome, thing about this story is that it manages to maintain a decidedly ambivalent moral line on Haskell.  On the one hand, we're evidently meant to admire him as a man of principle who stands up for what he believes in, putting himself at risk for a worthy cause.  But at the same time, he seems hopelessly naive about the persuasive value of his actions.  And although he clearly believes he's taking care not to hurt anyone, it's debatable whether he understands the practicalities as well as he thinks he does.

This is all quite interesting, and makes for a surprisingly balanced moral debate.  Other bits of the story don't work quite as well.  A subplot about the abusive stepfather doesn't get enough space to grow beyond cliche, and ends up feeling tacked on.  I think I see why it's there - it allows the story to end with somebody drawing practical inspiration from Haskell's off-beam example - but it doesn't quite fly.

By this point, the Minx imprint has developed a standard protagonist: a feisty teenage girl who usually learns a lesson of some sort in a coming-of-age story.  Danni doesn't fit that picture.  She starts off confused, latches onto Haskell as a cute guy with strong and seemingly persuasive opinions, and has moments of realisation, but still seems to end up as a spectator.  On a first reading, the ending seems decidedly odd and unresolved.

There's a reason for that.  Although it starts out as a romance, somewhere along the line this turns into another very familiar story: a misguided hero of passion and conviction is brought down by his lack of understanding.  It's a tragedy, in other words.  But the tragic hero is Haskell, not Danni.  She's just the narrator.  Presenting the story from her perspective, as if she was the star, has the effect of distracting us from a basically familiar plot because we keep waiting for Danni to do protagonist-type things.  And she never really does, which initially makes for a rather unsatisfying read.  I suspect, though, that it may be the sort of story that improves with re-reading. 

Either way, it's a slightly odd entry for the Minx imprint, since it isn't really a girl story at all.  Whether that's a strange misfire of this particular story, or signals the imprint intentionally diversifying from its rigid adherence to Protagonists Who Could Be You, I'm not sure.  We'll have to wait for future stories.

Artist Inaki Miranda isn't familiar to me, although he's done some work on Fables and 2000AD.  He does a good job here; there's nothing flashy, but his characters are expressive, and he makes the finale look suitably impressive.

This is an interesting book, albeit not a totally successful one.  It doesn't quite fit the Minx template, but that's not necessarily a bad thing. 

Rating: B

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