I've been looking forward to Kimmie66, a Minx digest from Aaron Alexovitch.  He previously illustrated Mike Carey's Confessions of a Blabbermouth, but more to the point (for me, at least), he's also responsible for the rather wonderful indie series Serenity Rose.

This is one of the weirder efforts from the Minx stable so far, although it's also arguably got the strongest central plot.  Set in the 23rd century, the story revolves around a future where people are spending inordinate amounts of their time online in virtual reality games.  Of course, this means that their social lives largely revolve around people they've never actually met, and who they really only know as a screen name and an avatar.

Our heroine is, as you'd expect from Minx, a 14-year-old girl.  Telly Kade follows somewhat in the line of Serenity Rose, as a quiet, intelligent, vaguely gothy character who identifies with the outsider aspect of that subculture but feels more than a little embarrassed by the theatrics.  Practically the first thing in the book is Telly assuring us that she doesn't really like parties, and asking "Aren't you relieved?" 

The titular Kimmie66 is Telly's best friend, and the story opens with Telly receiving her suicide note.  The rest of the book is basically a virtual reality ghost story, as Kimmie continues to show up in various online worlds, despite the minor handicap of having drowned.  Is it a hoax, a glitch, or a literal ghost in the machine?  That's the story. 

In an odd but clearly deliberate choice, we're told very, very little about Kimmie herself.  Her face is kept covered in flashbacks and she doesn't get to speak until late in the day.  So, even though Telly is our point of view character and our narrator, and the story is driven by her relationship with Kimmie, we don't get to share in it.

I think I can see what Alexovitch was going for, but I'm not sure it's altogether successful.  A key theme of this story, obviously, is the temptation to take refuge online behind entirely constructed personas.  He could tell essentially the same story today using message boards, but setting it in the future and using VR makes it much more visual.  It's basically the world that Second Life evangelists insist is just around the corner (although, in fact, the number of people who visit Second Life embassies is still embarrassingly tiny - the reason companies set them up is for the press release coverage).

Anyhow, Telly is unsettled by the fact that she doesn't really know any of her friends outside this completely fictitious environment.  That's a point neatly made with her surviving best friend, Nekokat, who stubbornly refuses to get into any conversation that acknowledges the outside world, even when discussing Kimmie's death.  So Kimmie is, presumably, a deliberate cipher for most of the story, vaguely signifying a search for identity through subcultures, without really having a clear persona beneath it all (or at least, not being sure of who that is).

This is all well and good in theory, but it does cause trouble for the story's emotional drive.  It really wants us to invest in Telly's quest to find out who Kimmie really was, but doesn't tell us a great deal about why she cares, or give us much detail about their relationship.  We get that near the end, but for the most part the story has to rely us liking Telly and caring about Kimmie because Telly cares about her.  It just about gets away with that, but I'm not sure it was the most effective way of telling the story.

Alexovitch is a wonderfully expressive cartoonist, and he produces some lovely, subtle artwork here.  The ghosts are beautifully done, and there's some nice comedy with the body language of putting Telly in a shoot-em-up avatar for a few pages.  The pacing in the second Citadel sequence is great.  I'm not quite so sold on the real world scenes in the future, which kind of look like the present day with some arbitrary tech upgrades.  Still, the story's not really about that setting, and overall the visuals are great.

Okay, there's a clunky plot point about people not being allowed to belong to more than one online world at a time.  That seems highly implausible and contrived, but fortunately it's a minor part of the story.  Otherwise, this is a general success - and even when it doesn't entirely work, it's at least interesting.

Whether there's a big market for teenage girls wanting to read stories about diffident goths who don't like parties and aren't keen on dressing up, I'm not so sure.  But I liked the book a lot.

Rating: A-

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