COMIC BOOK
How is it possible to receive a fax from your lover a year after he died? That's the mystery that launches Accelerate, a four-book comic series about a heroine named Marne who's fighting for her life 16 years into the future. In this cyberpunk action-thriller, writer Richard Kadrey has created characters more sympathetic than the scowling nihilists that usually populate the genre (think Neuromancer's emotionally numb Case, or the robot-like Bateau from Ghost in the Shell). Marne and her friends are known as Da Jui, or hungry ghosts. They are chronically ill teens and twentysomethings who were damaged by the genetically active drugs their parents took and must resort to thievery to finance the transplants and transfusions they need to stay alive.
Though its characters are interesting, Accelerate's predictable plotline borrows too heavily from cyberpunk conventions. Cutter, Marne's lover, has been uploaded to the Net, and she somehow doesn't figure this out even when he starts appearing on TV screens. (If only she'd watched reruns of Max Headroom) Adding to the story's recycled feeling, the drawings are less than groundbreaking. The market scene was especially familiar, with its now-cliché mix of high tech and biotech shop fronts frequented by a mass of multiculti street life.
Kadrey and artists the Pander Bros. do deliver action. The final installment follows Marne's attempts to get herself and her friends out of their sick flesh and onto the Net. The cops are about to attack, but our heroine is ready: She's in VR control of a very cool-looking giant robot cat. Cops plus cat add up to a very climactic battle.
Accelerate, written by Richard Kadrey, art by the Pander Bros.: $2.95 per issue. Vertigo/DC Comics: www.dccomics.com.
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