Despite my skepticism about Brian K. Vaughan I did enjoy reading this book and am looking forward to getting my hands on later volumes as they are released. The art in particular (as noted by a lot of people) is really great. The strong colors and jaggedly expressive lines really set this book apart for me.

As far as the story went I did end up finding it pretty intriguing. The girls themselves are pretty tough and I liked how different characters interpreted what was going on. Vaughan is clearly a skilled author and knows how exactly to keep a reader just off balance enough to have some real fun.

That said, I am a bit skeptical when it comes to the hype around Vaughan and so I did come up with some details that I found less then exciting. For starters, the fact that the girls were all prepubescent felt a bit easy. As a woman I have come to the realization that it is much easier for men to deal with girls who are not yet sexual. Misogynists in particular tend to love these kinds of pure virginal characters because they don't pose any threat to their masculinity. I am not saying that this is what Vaughan is doing, and I was interested in seeing a potentially positive older female role introduced right at the end of the story, but it is an easy out when it comes to writing feisty female characters.

More particular to this comic was really the behavior of the two groups of teenage males. While at least the first group (who casually threaten to rape these twelve year old girls) is portrayed as bad guys, even the two boys who end up saving Erin feel it's appropriate to refer to her as beautiful - as in "don't freak out , beautiful". I'm sure Vaughan himself (and many other people) would say that this is an extremely minor point, but for someone who seems to taut himself as a progressive type this comes across as rather clueless. This sort of thing is an extremely big deal to myself and many other women I know who have this sort of demeaning language pointed at them on a daily basis.

So yeah, I still have some minor concerns that Vaughan and Image are exploiting the market for empowered female characters. The story is still just getting started and I hope that I am proved completely wrong and the only issue at stake is the fact that female creators are still vastly underrepresented in mainstream comics. I am extremely glad that they did not in fact sexualize the twelve year old characters and the story does have a lot of potential. I always feel like a healthy dose of skepticism is a good thing although I will admit to holding this story at arms length deliberately.