Bettie Page #2 // Review
It’s dark. It’s hard to see what’s going on. They’re not where they’re supposed to be, but neither are the kidnappers in Bettie Page #2. The writing team of Mirka Andolfo and Luca Blengino continues a fast-moving mystery thriller that is gracefully whisked across page and panel by the art team of Elisa Ferrari, Mara Angelilli, and Tommaso Ronda. Color warms the page courtesy of Mauro Gulma and Francesca Vivaldi. The intrigue is simple enough to follow through a series of action sequences while being complex enough to engage the reader in another satisfying issue of the new series.
The kidnappers had intended to take someone who looked exactly like Bettie Page. They were Italian gangsters known to the woman they were meant to take: a woman with a remarkably dark personality who is determined to rescue her doppelgänger with the aid of her friends. The intended victim and Bettie’s friends will have to get to the bottom of what’s going on, but before they can do so, they will have to deal with a few goons. Then, they will have to deal with the rather strange notion that there might be TWO people walking around who look exactly like Bettie Page.
Andolfo and Blengino move the action around with a deft hand. There isn’t a great deal to the mystery. The ending for everyone involved is more or less assured. There’s little question that everything is going to turn out alright for everyone. There’s really no reason at all why the story should be appealing, but Andolfo and Blengino are so true to the quaintly sweet tropes of a simple mystery that the second issue of the series manages to remain deeply engaging from cover to cover. The plot is familiar. The title character is instantly recognizable. It’s such a very, very cozy second issue.
The art team continues to find a cute and cuddly approach to the art that feels like a late 20th-century cartoon while still bearing more than enough dramatic weight to draw in the reader’s emotions and shoot across the page when necessary for the proper action. There’s a graceful sense of pacing about the visual presentation of the story that fluidly modulates between fast-paced action and a slower, more thoughtful kind of drama. There isn’t a great deal of depth to it, but it all feels so appealing visually.
Andolfo and Blengino have established a story that seems familiar enough without feeling tedious. Given the universal recognition of Bettie, there might be a tendency to want to take the character in a direction that would be more weird and abstract simply for the sake of contrasting against how iconic a figure she is. Andolfo and Blengino have found a perfect spot for Bettie in a surprisingly enjoyable shallow mystery. They’re also managing to engage the reader in the peripheral characters. The charm of the current series might well run out in a few issues, but by then, the story will most assuredly have come to a close. Everything in the series is so well-balanced.
