Wild Girl - Leah Moore and John Reppion
Wild Girl was a 6-part miniseries for Wildstorm written by Leah Moore and John Reppion that unfortunately ended up falling through the cracks. DC/Wildstorm didn’t see it fit to even release a trade of it. In an interview, Leah Moore remarked, “I think it could have sold really well if it had been pushed a little bit, but not at comic fans. I have had kids and young girls come up to me at conventions and say how much they liked it, my ten-year-old nephew loved it, my cousin of the same age loved it. The audience Scott told us to aim it at was basically teenagers. We did that, quite well I thought, and then it was criticised by middle-aged male comic fans. It seems that western comics are the only place where teenage girl’s opinions don’t rule the market, which in Wild Girl’s case was a shame.” It’s interesting, particular in light of the success of manga, that Moore laments the lack of a push towards an intended audience. As John Reppion added, “[W]e aimed the book pretty squarely at teenage girls, a market that is notoriously overlooked by mainstream comic books, and if we’d been promoted as such we might have done better,” although the intriguing story and strong characters certainly could’ve appealed to all readers. Plus, the art by Shawn McManus, Andrew Pepoy, and J.H. Williams III is amazing and gorgeous.
Wild Girl #1 - Incidentally, that third panel is the cutest thing ever.
Wild Girl is all about mythology, reading like an urban folktale. Not an old fairy tale trussed up in modern clothing, but drawing on the aesthetics and structure of folktales and adapting them to an urban context. There are the familiar archetypes and elements - a child with a single parent, tests and quests, the dangerous stranger villain, helper animals - mixed in with the larger examination of how animals have played a role in human mythology. A nice structural bit is seeing a different culture’s myth told from the animal’s perspective in every issue as an enlightening experience for the heroine. Some of those featured are the Greek story of Odysseus’ faithful dog Argos; the Abrahamic story of Noah sending out a raven (which did not return) and a dove (which did); and the origin myth of the Hindu god Ganesh.
WG #1
In a nutshell, the mini-series was the story of Rosa, a young girl, who ran away from home after a bird crashing into a window causes her to see frightening visions and knocks her out. After another vision, she meets a seemingly kindly old man who also seems to know what’s going on with her “dreams.” However, he turns out to be far more sinister than he first appears and Rosa manages to escape his grasp, only after hopping a barbed wire fence and being knocked out upon hitting the ground. When she wakes up, she finds she can talk to the animals, and that she’s their “Chosen One”…
WG #3
As she grows with each test accomplished and new knowledge gained, she becomes more driven in her ultimate quest, moreso when she finds out the Sinister Man has kidnapped her baby brother. If you doubt how badass Rosa is, check out the sequence where she fights a freakin’ crocodile.
WG #5
This (and the Noah tale where another of Noah’s dove is killed by a lizard on an island) should also assure that Moore and Reppion’s nature isn’t warm and fuzzy and sanitized, but still red in tooth and claw. She’d get along well with another badass, awesome wild girl. Moore and Reppion do a lot of great things in this series. They make Rosa, I think, into a really great character that could’ve been fun to follow in a continuing series, as she develops further into her destiny. In the tradition of folktales, Rosa sets out on her own and goes through tests and quests that will help her grow and be strong enough for the final confrontation. And Rosa, herself, is very self-reliant, independent, and active. She’s been established as already dealing with a lot of responsibilities for her age, with a single working mother in a middle/lower-middle class neighborhood. In a really nicely done sequence, she’s able to support herself fine when she runs away for a long stretch of time.
WG #1
They translated the formula of folktales fits perfectly into the urban landscape (an especially clever and nice combination of the Egyptian crocodile god Sobek and the urban legend of crocs/gators in the sewers), and it’s a particularly skillful touch that, as Rosa grows, the normal, bustling human world starts to fade into the background. It’s especially nice for a maturity tale like this where Rosa eventually must break away from her family and embrace the lonely hero life. It’s interesting to note that the mother is the only parent that’s trying to love and support the children, and it’s the father that’s absent. There was a recent discussion on absent mothers in Disney films and the folktales they were based on (and in general), and Moore and Reppion flip it. Something I thought was a clever bit was a twist on the whole superhero costume thing. Usually costumes are made to be a huge deal, trying to be fashionable and show-offy more than realistic or practical. How much does spandex with unstable molecules cost? Where do heroes on a budget go? I kinda always had a hard time believing Peter Parker all alone could afford the right materials and could fix up a costume that doesn’t look amateurish. She’s a kid on her own with no money, what does Rosa do? She just raids the clothing donation box for anything.
WG #4
Practical!
