Voodoo #2 – Review

By: Ron Marz (writer), Sami Basri & Hendry Prasetya (artists), Jessica Kholinne (colorist)

The Story: One minute you’re making love, the other you’re at each other’s throats.

The Review: Some people gave this title’s debut issue a hard time for its starting choice of setting, and perhaps this turned off readers from the series early on.  That seems an unjust gut reaction to the storytelling choices Marz is making here, since at its backbone, the title has much more to it than a lurid excuse for sexually-exploitive scenes.  But now that we’ve gotten past that hump, we can set aside that distracting controversy and speak to the issue on its own merits.

Voodoo seemed a little one-dimensional when we first saw her—for good reason, as she spent most the issue dancing and taking her clothes off (not exclusively in that order).  The most you could surmise was that she was an alien trying to fit in among humans.  Here, she makes it clear that assumption may be true, but “…I’m not one of them.  I’ll never be one of them.  And I’ll make them pay.”  Clearly, she has a purpose for being here, and it may not bode well for us.

Her vengeful agenda may surprise you, likely because we’ve been conditioned by the likes of Superman, Starfire, and Martian Manhunter to believe that all outer space visitors just want to be like us.  To have a protagonist who not only doesn’t care about acceptance, but who may actively seek our destruction certainly sends this title in an interesting new direction.

We don’t know what motivates Voodoo (certainly not our moral code, which she dismisses), but clearly, it’s enough to keep her courting danger for the sake of telepathic data-gleaning.  Though she knows her enemies are onto her, she not only sticks around, she actually goes into the lion’s den, usurping the identity of Agent Fallon’s partner (both in business and lovemaking), whom she just killed last issue.  A twisted move by any standard, but she seems completely impenitent.