If you were browsing through your local comic shop today –a day with 9+ Batman-related comics hitting the shelves– and saw this comic and said to yourself, “Drawings of a sixteen year old girl taking a bright, golden poo?! Yes, please!” YOU ARE ABOUT TO BE VERY DISAPPOINTED. This is easily one of DC’s most misleading covers of all-time. Nowhere beyond the cover will you see an under-age girl painfully excrete noble metals. Nowhere.
Seriously though, folks, what the **** is going on with this cover? Who put bright sunbeams bursting out from under Stargirl’s butt and then situated a group of people around her grinning from ear to ear as she releases a BM of pure light? It’s like they’re gathering around as if she’s some sort of Scatomancer and they’re all going to have their fortunes read– and by the way, Scatomancer is a real term for a someone who reads fortunes using poo, a fact that I learned only like two days ago from a random Q.I. tweet that I NEVER THOUGHT I’D HAVE TO USE. But here we are. Anyway, that cover is bad and everyone responsible should feel bad. Moving on…
“In Your Head” is a character driven story and it’s all about Stargirl. At the end of last month’s issue we saw her and J’onn escape from the Crime Syndicate’s prison but upon their exit, J’onn somehow merged his entire being into Stargirl’s mind. It was an unfortunate side-effect made all the worse by the fact that a now mentally distraught Stargirl is face-to-face with a rather formidable lineup of enemies from the Secret Society of Supervillains.
The way that issue #10 is structured is that we phase back and forth between what’s happening in reality (a brutal beatdown) and the mental turmoil that Stargirl and J’onn are suffering. Once again, J’onn must convince someone that what they are seeing is not real and they need to wake up and once again the afflicted character struggles to let go of their visions– only this time if they don’t snap out of it, Giganta will pummel them into the ground. The stakes are higher, but the dialogue is quite low and by low I mean it’s repetitive. Let’s face it, there’s only so many ways J’onn can say “Please, wake up!” before you start to pray for the story to just get on with it! Still, it’s great to get more insight into Stargirl’s past, especially for those of us who never knew much about her. However, I’m sure many readers pick up Justice League of America right now because they have their fingers crossed on some Forever Evil plot progression and that simply doesn’t happen. There’s nothing that JLA tells us that we didn’t already know. And honestly, I’m starting to wonder if I should cut it from the review rotation since there really isn’t anything Batman-related going on in this book anymore either!
Art duties are handled between Eddy Barrows and Tom Derenick, but the transition is pretty seamless. Barrow, the former artist of Nightwing, does most of the heavy lifting and makes for a pretty attractive comic with some nice looking action sequences and well-done page layouts. There aren’t any visuals that will make your jaw drop, but it gets the job done.
Recommended If…
- You like deeply cerebral stories
- You wish to own the origin story of the New 52 Stargirl
Overall
Matt Kindt’s “In Your Head” is a good comic for Stargirl fans and it has genuine moments of real brilliants but it also gets rather repetitive and offers no new developments in the Forever Evil saga. If you care at all about Stargirl, it’s a must buy, but if you don’t then this can probably be skipped.
SCORE: 6.5/10
