Mystique continues its second storyline, "Tinker Tailor Mutant Spy", as Mystique arrives in South Africa in search of a killer virus.

This time round we're in Johannesburg, and neither Mystique nor writer Brian K Vaughan seem to be exactly wild about the place.  Granted, Shortpack gets to make a little speech about Johannesberg as the city of hope, where they've just opened a lovely symbolic bridge.  But South Africa's not a fantastic place to be at the moment - it's about as bad as you can get for violent crime, and it's supposed to have the world's highest incidence of rape.

Anyway.  It's the same format that worked in the previous arc - basically, a straight action thriller story, but with a dash of politics drawn from the backdrop.  A couple of pages of discussion of the aftermath of apartheid, and a couple of page of tongue-in-cheek catfighting.  They've got the right balance, and it does work.

The plot involves bioweapons, but thankfully this doesn't lead into anything else about the war on terrorism.  Instead, we've got a character called the Host wandering around, who appears to be a mutant disease carrier.  She gets a little speech at the end to the effect that she's "a freedom fighter for those who are hunted, oppressed and outcast."  I have a sinking feeling that she's going to turn out to be a fighter for the rights of viruses, which doesn't immediately strike me as a winning concept.  Respect for all life is a nice idea on paper, but taken to that extreme it amounts to a moral imperative against cutting the grass. 

The art is looking great - it's shot directly from Michael Ryan's pencils and then coloured by Matt Milla.  Unlike some of the previous attempts at this technique, Ryan and Milla haven't abandoned black lines (which usually seems to result in washed out and hazy pages).  Rather, it lets them be subtler about texture and shadow.

Another solid issue.

Rating: B+

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