Saturday, 24 December 2011

Spotlight on: Spinnerette

There's a new hero squirting sticky white fluid everywhere: meet Spinnerette


I've never been an enormous fan of superhero comics; far be it from me, a fan of super-sonic hedgehogs and bright blue weapon-stealing robots, to say that adults can't enjoy something fundamentally aimed at children, but therein lies the problem - Marvel and DC tried to grow up with their audience, and it went about as well as you'd expect for adults clinging to their childhood. Trying to slap a welcome layer of self-knowing deprecation on top really doesn't help either; it just adds layer after ridiculous layer to a pair of universes that manage to reboot and retrograde themselves all the time, yet can never bear to completely drop something from the increasingly tangled Christmas lights that are their respective continuities. I'd go on, but this paragraph ended up running to five hundred words more before I deleted it in favour of simply moving on to today's comic, Spinnerette.

Tongue firmly in cheek, Spinnerette avoids the trap of straight-up parody, instead playing out as a relatively by-the-numbers comic that comes with its own collection of quirks, be it the League of Canadian Superheroes announcing themselves in both English and French or lead girl Heather being sued by Marvel after using a fancy dress costume for her disguise. Everyone has their own quirks; the male Green Gable is forced by tradition to follow his female superhero ancestors by wearing a dress, and Kat O'Nine Tails uses her prehensile tails to be a part-time masseuse. Heather, meanwhile, learns to her dismay while trying to shoot webs from her wrists that, true to a spider's anatomy, her webbing shoots out from her butt; close enough, at least, to make using it an off-puttingly awkward affair in early chapters.

Author KrazyKrow apparently has plans for the future, including a spin-off featuring the lead trio's Canadian counterparts, but none of it is likely to see the light of day without support and recognition. So, head on over to http://www.krakowstudios.com/spinnerette/ to start reading.

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