How do you follow-up a critical hit about intergalactic bounty hunters? If you’re Magdalene Vissagio, you come back to earth and get Eryk Donovan to draw shotgun on a tale of high school romance. Of course, Earth, in this case, is populated by mad science gone broke, DIY time machines and skateboarding (okay, so that last one isn’t really anything new).
Written by Magdalene Vissagio
Illustrated by Eryk DonovanMad science is the punkest shit there is. Teenage sweethearts Nat & Sumesh spend their nights breaking into abandoned superlabs to steal the parts they need to build a time machine – and they’ve just found the most important part. But mysterious entities keep trying to stop them from turning it on. Now all they’ve gotta do is hang on long enough to figure out why. Magdalene Visaggio (Kim & Kim) and Eryk Donovan (Memetic) bring you a high-octane adventure full of robots, muscle cars, and queer-ass skater punks.
The first shift of Vissagio and Donovan’s “Quantum Teens Are Go” punches in mid-heist, as science punks Nat and Sumesh scavenge decommissioned gear from a foreclosed robotics warehouse. The artwork crackles with youthful intensity as the pair throwdown against a security droid. Nat wields her set of bolt cutters like a battle axe in a full-page splash that nearly has her diving up and out of the page. In the background, Sumesh clutches a bullhorn-shaped ray-gun.
Soon after, Donovan devotes an entire panel to the gnarly solar flare that sizzles forth when that gun fires. Meanwhile, Vissagio introduces a rival gang, somehow spurned in the past by the duo, and escalates everything into a battle royal of laser blasts versus hordes of sentient tech. The art and pacing get the blood pumping with maximum efficiency. But in hindsight, this thrilling cold open is pretty indicative of how the issue as a whole operates.
There’s a delightful lack of exposition throughout the story. In the opening, Vissagio gives Donovan one panel for scene-setting before we see Nat getting decked in the face by a metal fist. There’s no time to ask any questions – really, there’s no need to. There are hints and allusions to backstory. And the creators are more than comfortable letting us cobble together what’s going on, because there’s no way the characters are going to stop and explain when they’re being run down by robots.
In much the same way, Nat and Sumesh’s characters, and the alt-future surrounding them, is doled out piecemeal through references to her transition, Sumesh’s parents, the Exxie Community, the Odyssey Crew, and the plentiful number of “shuttered superscience labs” that seemingly litter this version of Los Angeles like pirate’s bounty – none of which are elaborated on. But there’s never the sense the Vissagio is holding things back to manufacture tension. Questions will be raised, that’s for sure, but it’s not important for them to be answered right now because the people talking know what they’re talking about. It’s on us to play catch up.
It’s a quality that helps the issue flow at such a lively pace. There’s a subtle rhythm to the dialog that makes interactions feel like they’re building naturally off events we didn’t see. It’s not so much that scenes begin mid-exchange, it’s that each conversation seems to pick up on threads from previous ones. It’s quite an effective world-building technique.
There’s youthful exuberance in the coloring. When Donovan takes a break from sketching the back alleys, gas stations and garages behind his character work, Claudia Aguirre jumps in to make the panels pop with pinks and oranges and blues. There’s a vibrancy to these tones that really captures Nat and Sumesh’s lust for life. Characters bound from one page to another with a flowing lilt reminiscent of Adrian Alphona’s’ artwork – and between that and the defiant ebullience of the leads, there seems to be enough spiritual lineage between this and “The Runaways,” that I would not be at all surprised to find out Sumesh’s parents aligned themselves with the dark side of the aforementioned superscience.
While Donovan’s lines are fluid, there’s a gritty, DIY aesthetic to this world. It’s as every feat of technological fantasy on display came from junkyards and grease-stained garages, not sterile laboratories. There’s innovative framing – Nat blasting that ray-gun is a gestural scratch caught as a reflection of herself in the eye of a robot. And there’s also subtle nuances that clearly outline the dynamic between her and Sumesh. Donavon sells the former’s elation about a certain piece of tech, and then absolutely nails Nat’s deadpan reaction with two near identical panels stacked atop each other: her expression utterly blank in the first and the faintest hint of recognition in the second. “Okay, so you and I definitely both know what that is. But let’s pretend that I don’t and you explain it to me.” She’s more the muscle and he’s more the brains in the operation.
Continued belowAnd it’s their relationship that’s really the heart of the issue. It’s so easy to care about them because they so clearly care for each other. Vissagio and Donovan capture genuine affection – if not love, then the loftiest echelon of shared infatuation that high school has to offer. Diverse representation is important, so it’s awesome to see a non-binary couple like Nat and Sumesh headline a title like this.
But it’s even more awesome to see them headline this title because they’re awesome characters. Period. Nat is a badass skateboarder. And Sumesh is a slacker savant who probably built his own ray-gun. There’s even an early scene that seems to subvert lazy, exploitive trans narratives. Waking up after her wild night at Arclight, Nat grabs a tin of concealer… to cover up the scuffs and bruises she got from cracking robots skulls with a set of bolt cutters. I repeat: Nat is a badass.
“Quantum Teens are Go” is a deadly first issue. Go pick it up. Now. It’s an important book – lowercase “i” – important because Black Mask publishes great books and you need to buy them all so they can continue publishing great books because stories about badass science punks laser-blasting robots and DIY-fabricating time machines in their garage are freaking great and need to be published.
Final Verdict: 8.0 – Science punks kick science ass. Quantum teens are awesome.
