Alias 2I read the first vol­ume of ALIAS and was blown away by the story, the char­ac­ters and the art­work. The read­ing expe­ri­ence was unlike any­thing I’d ever read in the comic book world.

I mean the writer and artist seem so attuned to each other in their sto­ry­telling skills that the result of their efforts was a huge win for this reader.

Alias, which is apart of the Mar­vel MAX line, fol­lows an ex-superhero who now works as a pri­vate inves­ti­ga­tor. To briefly recap, Jes­sica Jones aka “Jewel” hung up the cos­tume in favor of doing inves­tiga­tive work. She’s the sole pro­pri­etor of Alias, Inc. Com­par­a­tively, her super­hero pow­ers were not really all that great com­pared to the other icons in the Mar­vel uni­verse and so she quit.

In “Come Home”, the story arc in here is sup­pos­edly related to a cou­ple of true sto­ries per the author. Jes­sica Jones is asked to inves­ti­gate a miss­ing teen-age girl from a small town in upstate New York. It doesn’t take Jes­sica long to ascer­tain that she has landed in a big­oted town.

There’s been rumors about Rebecca Cross, the young teen who is miss­ing, being a mutant. The term, “mutant” has the neg­a­tive con­no­ta­tion of being labeled gay, black or Jew­ish. The town’s preacher espouses on hate reg­u­larly every Sun­day thereby ampli­fy­ing the big­oted views of the town. Maybe even prompt­ing some of the town folks to put action behind their rad­i­cal, big­oted views.

We later learn that there’s a story going around town about a kid who had fallen out of tree but didn’t break any bones. He was labeled a mutant, too. The boy’s fam­ily was tar­geted and harassed and ended up leav­ing their son behind. Did Rebecca suf­fer the same fate? Did some­one harm her? The con­clu­sion to this story arc wasn’t a big sur­prise but enjoy­able all the same.

In “Rain­ing Men,” this thread has Jes­sica going out on a date with another super­hero, Ant-Man. Her friend, Carol Dan­vers aka Mrs Mar­vel, set this one up for her. It just shows the two of them hav­ing a very enlight­en­ing con­ver­sa­tion while Spi­der­man is out­side fight­ing with Doc­tor Octo­pus and nei­ther of which are moved to help, which I thought was amus­ing. This story arc was a bit ho-hum and delved more into Jessica’s pri­vate life.

jessicajonesJes­sica is a inter­est­ing char­ac­ter with flaws. Among her char­ac­ter flaws, she is too fond of the bot­tle which tends to screw up her judg­ment which results in her mak­ing some bad choices and yeah, she loves to say “fuck” a lot, too.

She chain smokes and seems to have some self-esteem issues. Other than that, her char­ac­ter is built pretty strong and is an ongo­ing devel­op­ment, mean­ing that with each new entry we learn a lit­tle more about her. As of yet, she’s revealed noth­ing about why she quit the super­hero business.

There are some added bonuses with this vol­ume in that artist David Mack shares his “sketch­book” of Rebecca’s draw­ings which are a col­lage of images that are used to pro­vide insight into Rebecca’s char­ac­ter while she was miss­ing. Some of it is rather riv­et­ing. Any­way, this vol­ume col­lects #11 to 15. Again, the sto­ry­telling is superb as are the char­ac­ters and the art­work by Michael Gay­dos. I enjoyed it but prob­a­bly not as much as the first vol­ume. My grade, B. I plan to fin­ish this series.

Mar­vel MAX line con­tains explicit con­tent. It should go with­out say­ing that the con­tent of this series is not appro­pri­ate for chil­dren as it has sex­u­al­ity and bad language.