Finally for this week, Gail Simone and Adriana Melo's Rose & Thorn miniseries.

I'm not a particular expert on DC characters.  However, my sketchy research tells me that the original "Rose and Thorn" series debuted in 1970 as a back-up strip in Superman's Girlfriend, Lois Lane.  In the original version, Rose Forrest's father was killed by a criminal gang, the 100.  Rose fought the 100 as the vigilante Thorn.  The twist was that Rose had multiple personality disorder and wasn't even aware that she was Thorn.  The concept of a secret identity taken to faintly ridiculous lengths, in other words.

The original Rose and Thorn are still wandering around the DC Universe somewhere, as near as I can tell.  But it doesn't really matter, since this seems to be a reboot, and issue #1 is the origin story.

Gail Simone is best known as a comedy writer.  But this is a very different style from her, as she writes the Rose and Thorn concept straight.  The concept has been tweaked somewhat, but remains fundamentally the same - Rose is the good girl, Thorn is the repressed aggression.  Thankfully, Simone seems to have dumped the campy idea that they weren't aware of one another.

The impressive thing is that this issue manages to make Rose and Thorn seem like a plausible character.  It only takes a moment's reflection to realise what a tough sell the concept is.  Multiple personality disorder usually ends up as a dreadful little plot device that reduces characters to gimmicks.  The trick is that, obviously, Rose and Thorn are a metaphor for repression, rather than any kind of serious study of mental illness.  The way to make it believable is to focus on Rose's efforts to reshape her personality and bury Thorn. 

If you can sell the audience on that bit, which is easy to identify with, then everything else follows.  It's not quite that Rose and Thorn become believable characters, but rather that it's easy to identify with what they represent.  Simone skilfully steers the audience in that direction and makes a very tricky concept work.

Artist Adriana Melo does a nice job with the body language and personality shifts.  Melo also makes nice use of fuzzy, warped panels to represent Thorn's imprisonment, strikingly out of line with the more conventional style of the rest of the art. 

Good issue, especially considering how it manages to make an extremely contrived concept seem believable.

Rating: A

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