Written by Frank Cho and Doug Murray
Illustrated by Frank Cho and Axel MedellinHot on the heels of his blockbuster New Ultimates run, FRANK CHO teams with Co-writer DOUG MURRAY (The ‘Nam) and artist AXEL MEDELLIN (ELEPHANTMEN) to unleash a new universe-spanning sci-fi epic! Join in the fantastic voyage of the Space Vessel ESS Savannah and her beautiful crew as they fight their way from hostile aliens and exotic worlds, searching for the wormhole that will take them to their ultimate destination: Home.
I think Murray is the Russ, and Cho is the Meyer. More on this after the jump.
“What the HELL is THAT?” “Who care?! It’s HOSTILE!” So begins 50 Girls 50 #1, the preceding exchange taking place between a pair of tight spacesuits clinging to curvy, feminine rear ends, so intrusively tight as to annihilate any assumption of underwear. And so it goes for the next twenty-something pages. I’ll say this for it, though, it’s a timely series: in the very near future, nearly every terrestrial resource is exhausted, and it takes a special team to bring precious unobtainium (or whatever) back from the planet Proxima. With food prices reportedly due to double by 2030 and the perpetual hair-greying over the planet’s oil reserves, these are very real concerns that could have very real consequences for our planet. 50 Girls 50 calls our attention to another problem looming in the future, though: an imminent shortage of clothing for buxom women. Priorities, and all.
The team of Frank Cho and Doug Murray has previously brought us two ‘seasons’ of Jungle Girl, in which we learned all about the perils of the natural world (and dinosaurs) that can be overcome with grit, cleverness, and a bikini. Here, they up the ante in every conceivable way: planets, not jungles; 50 girls instead of just the one; full-body-covering catsuits instead of meager swimsuits. Even the genetics are bigger, because these space-travel-ready women are the rarest of the rare — XXX-chromosomed, a mere 50 out of 30 or 40 billion humans. (In real life, Triple X Syndrome is a real thing, and occurs in 1 out of 1,000 girls. Potential side effects include being taller than average.) In his end notes, Murray assures us that a logical explanation is coming as to why all of these 50 XXX-set women have bodies like Tura Satana in her prime. I’ll admit to wondering why he wants to bother, since the only explanation we probably need is the “Cho” right there on the cover. If even one of these women was narrow-hipped and reedy, well, THAT would need some explaining.
As an industrial species, humanity tends to act first and consider the ramifications of those actions later. This is consistent with 50 Girls 50, where the girls’ spaceship is set off on its resource-gathering mission using untested wormhole technology. “Untested,” as you may have guessed, is sci-fi code for “the return trip doesn’t bring them back home.” Following this discovery of a brave new world, the girls again act impulsively, sending a dropship down to the planet’s surface, seemingly without remotely surveying it first. The ship crashes and the ecosystem devours plastics, which everything is made of in the future, clothing included. The passage of time in 50 Girls 50 #1 is not marked by the position of the sun, or a handy digital wristwatch. It’s shown through the state of the two leads’ clothing, as catsuits dissolve into tank tops and shorts, and from there melt until they’re wearing nothing more than scrappy, convenient g-strings. Murray’s end notes do not specify whether we’ll also learn how the enzymes knew to reduce sections of clothing in such specific order.
So there you have the plot of 50 Girls 50 #1: two spacefaring women get dropped on a planet that melts their clothes, until they get a ride back to their spaceship. They also go hot-air ballooning using the corpse of a giant beetle. The characterization — what there is — seems totally incidental to this. One woman — short-haired, blonde, presumably Russian, name already forgotten — seems to have germophobia-induced hallucinations. (She spends a lot of time in the shower, showing that even though Earth’s resources are nearly evaporated, no one bothered to learn anything about water conservation.) Then again, she veers between freaking out at the prospect of dirty bugs touching her and then happily straddling the shell of a dead beetle, so what’s going on there is not even remotely clear. The other women who appear are competent and wisecracky. I remember the characters not by the names the endnotes provide, but by their hairstyles, which is the art’s main means of telling them apart.
Continued belowThe writers held an Internet competition to determine the artist on 50 Girls 50 (their former Jungle Girl collaborator is now doing Jennifer Blood with Garth Ennis), and came up with Axel Medellin. He’s by no means a bad artist, but you can still see the green in his gills every now and then — mostly in the chances he doesn’t take. His storytelling is solid, and does seem to be trying to differentiate the girls facially (although not by much), which only does so much good when they’re all in the same clothes and all have the same body type. (Then again, Cho himself would be running into the same problem, honestly.) One thing I’ve noticed, though, is that he tends to throw in as little shadow as possible, which makes Niko Koustis’s bright coloring seem all the brighter. I couldn’t tell you why this bugs me — especially in 50 Girls 50, which might as well be a comic about action figures — but it does. All things considered, though, the more practice this Medellin guy gets, the bigger chance of him growing into an interesting artist, so if he’s gonna cut his teeth here, so be it.
Oh, and in case you were asking: yes, the comic is full of huge breasts and positively pants-splitting asses. People thrust their hips for no real reason while standing still, or make sure to attack at just the right angle so that a sunbeam hits the crack of their ass and the undercurve of their breasts is exposed by their melty rag bikini top. Mass Effect 2 players who wish the game’s characters could all be replaced by Miranda Lawson over and over again, well, I think I’ve found the comic for you, you know? I mean, we had to get to what was really important in 50 Girls 50 sooner or later.
Final Verdict: 5.0 / NSFW summary: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cblKyckPaaY
