Written by Mike Carey
Illustrated by Sonny Liew and Marc HempelMY FAITH IN FRANKIE tells the story of a girl who discovers that having your own deity isn’t all it’s cracked up to be — particularly when your god turns out to be jealous! Reprinting the 4-issue miniseries.
This is a tough one to summarize. For one, it’s all right there in the solicitation copy. For another, that copy barely grazes the actual tone of the book, although Marc Hempel’s cover comes close. I don’t know. Maybe we should just get into this after the jump, so I can tell you why you should buy this thing, even though you probably won’t.
Perhaps the most common delusion of humanity, shared by many and yet unique to each, is destiny. Trust in it, and your successes (or those of the people whose actions affect you) are only partly your own, and parly some unknowable riptide carrying you off. Frankie Moxon, seventeen-year-old star of My Faith in Frankie, has something better than destiny on her side: her very own god, who spoils her rotten.
Jeriven is a young god who finds purpose in his singular believer. His zeal in protecting her from even the gentlest bruise of life extends all the way to keeping boys at bay, and those males who show interest quickly find their asses catching fire or their libidos wilted by a plague of voyeuristic baby rabbits. Frankie can have anything else she wants, but her jeans must stay buttoned. Of course, a lifetime of being pampered so thoroughly means that she wants what she can’t have. This causes problems, as you can imagine. Watching from the sidelines is Frankie’s best friend Kay, whose lack of self-confidence is as desperately endearing (or endearingly desperate) as Frankie’s lust and Jeriven’s neediness.
My Faith in Frankie debuted in 2004, when Mike Carey was still “the Lucifer guy,” not “the X-Men guy.” It ran for four issues, which were purchased by, I believe, me and maybe six other people in the world. It was then reprinted as a miniature digest paperback, chosen format of the manga boom’s younger reader base. Then it just went away. Mike Carey did other things, Vertigo did other things. The art team went on with their lives (and we’ll get to them in a moment). The series doesn’t even have a Wikipedia page. But now it’s here, all bound into one 100-page comic book, for an entirely new set of people to pass over and ignore.
Of course, they do so at their own peril, because at $8 this is a great deal.
Let’s start with the most immediate pleasure, which even illiterates can enjoy: the pictures. The art is what gives Frankie its tremulous, dopey quality — probably its most vital aspect. Sonny Liew’s pencils all but fidget on the page, giving us a land of boys and girls with perpetual nervousness. Their clothes are as stylish and believable as Jeriven’s hairstyle isn’t — a huge Morrissey-gone-Leningrad-Cowboy quiff that is, it must be said, truly godlike. People have small hands and long necks and tilt their heads constantly, and based on childhood flashbacks appear to have evolved into gangly teenage entities from single-celled blobs with mouths and haircuts. Marc Hempel’s inks harly rein in the quirk. Instead, they give it fluidity and ease of motion. Hempel’s deceptively simple style, put to astonishing effect in Neil Gaiman’s Sandman arc The Kindly Ones, shines most strongly in things like the shadowy curves of clothing, or the roundness of people’s chins. Frankie‘s art is, above all other functions, a pleasure of details.
It’s in that weird little teenage-heaven world that Carey swoops through the story as if he was gliding on the wind. It’d be easy, almost cliche, to put the weight of the universe on My Faith in Frankie‘s plot and particulars: ideas like the renouncement of faith for sin, the relationship between human and god, the rewards of belief, and a bully-war between gods and demons. If you devote your life to someone and they roll the other way and say that they’ve outgrown you, how is that not sad? Well, by being really, really funny, for one. Of course Jeriven, stripped of his godly powers, is pummeled and left nude and sputter. Of course Kay, seeking to get him off the street, pulls him into a strip clup because it’s the nearest available door. Of course they make her apply for a membership to even sit in the lobby, and of course they send them home with Jeriven wearing the only stray clothes available, a clingy minidress. In the face of world-eating despair, absurdity — perhaps the only force stronger.
Will My Faith in Frankie return triumphant, a great lost work of comics literature, leering and smirking in the light of renewed appreciation? No, of course not. It’s twee and self-consciously adorable and sanded liberally with human failings, and the first two are enough to put off a lot of people. On the other hand, if you’ve ever loved a Belle and Sebastian song, now’s the time to seek this out. If it does have a destiny, it’s to be cherished by the few who reach out to it, accepting its whim and preoccupations. It’s a comic book about a teenager who wants her god to go away so her panties can do the same. It’s the definition of a cult comic.
Final Verdict: 9.0 – You were just going to spend that eight bucks on Fear Itself stuff anyway
