What started as a gig at the paper actually turned into an all-star walk-on with special focus on Jessica being pregnant with Luke's kid and freaking the hell out when the Green Goblin blows something up near her.

Watching her beat the shit out him was something special. And then when Luke came around to finish the job when the GG was about to get out of it by lawyers? I cheered. :)

This wasn't a blockbuster story, but it was good and it was solid. I couldn't help but grin and get sucked right in. Fanboy. You know? ( )

The end of Alias wasn't the end of Jessica Jones; she soon became one of the central characters of another Brian Michael Bendis series, The Pulse, about the writers at the Daily Bugle, especially those in a special section focusing on superheroes.  (Jessica is there to investigate, though not write.)  This volume sees the Daily Bugle staff investigating the death of one of their own.

It's not very interesting.  I don't quite know why, but nothing the characters did ever grabbed me.  The mystery is pathetic.  There's no resonance to this.  Whereas Alias used the question "What would the Marvel Universe look like to a private investigator?" to say something very interesting about powerlessness, The Pulse asks "What would the Marvel Universe look like to newspaper reporters?" and discovers that the answer is "Exactly the same."  The subversion of the genre tells us nothing of interest.

And the reason I picked up the book, Jessica Jones herself, is weirdly off.  I don't think it's the dialogue, as the same guy wrote both Alias and The Pulse, but it might be, as The Pulse is paced much more like a conventional superhero comic; there's no awkward six-page halting conversations here.  It probably doesn't help that, now that she's pregnant, all Jessica does is worry about her unborn child.  I don't doubt that being pregnant would change her, but it's basically her only personality attribute here.  Worse, Michael Gaydos has been replaced by Mark Bagley, who has what is probably a decent style for a superhero comic, but is a complete mismatch for one about Jessica Jones.  As when Takeshi Miyazawa left Spider-Man Loves Mary Jane, her body language is just wrong, and it makes all the dialogue seem off; she doesn't move the way Jessica moves or make the faces that Jessica makes.  Given time I might get used to it, but with only five issues collected in this thin volume, it's time I don't have.

Jessica Jones: « Previous in sequence | Next in sequence »

Jessica Jones moves from the R-rated world to the PG-world and instantly loses her sass.

It's a rough and jarring transition for Alias fans. The art is cartoon-y and virtually all of Jessica's rough edges seem to have been rounded out. ( )