Mother Panic #11

Written by: Jody Houser, Jim Krueger
Art by: Shawn Crystal, Phil Hester
Colors by: Jean-François Beaulieu, Trish Mulvihill
Published by: DC’s Young Animal

Mother Panic has slowly become one of the strongest titles from DC’s Young Animals imprint, which is saying something since all titles have been incredible for this past year. In issue #11, Houser and Crystal continue to explore Violet Paige’s time at Gather House by introducing to us a new character (from last issue), named Jane. We learn through a series of flashbacks that Jane was Violet’s best friend at Gather House and that they haven’t seen each other since Violet set the house on fire.

Being a victim of past abuse, namely from Gather House, Violet’s interactions with Jane show a deep-seated lack of trust towards others, even a girl she knew as a friend, as well as a fear of being intimate - which essentially goes hand-in-hand with the former. Violet finds out from Jane that she survived the fire simply because she was away and had nowhere to go back to. Knowing this, Violet is still very apprehensive about having Jane back in her life. She knows something is up and that she is potentially dangerous.

Back at Violet’s hideout, we get a fun interaction between our resident reformed supervillain Ratcatcher and Dom, Dr. Varma’s resident intern. Their interaction is a nice change pace from the rest of the comic because we get to be the fly on the wall just like these characters are within the comic itself. Their discussion turns to Violet’s mother Rebecca and we get the first sense there might be something more to her than meets the eye.

The art as usual has been stellar in Mother Panic and I continue to really enjoy each new artist that comes on board. Crystal is not quite Edwards, but his style is in the similar vein and adds a bit of artistic continuity to the series that is often lacking in comics these days.

With every issue of Mother Panic, we also get the backup story from Krueger and Hester: Gotham Radio. You have to hand it to these two, they have done a lot every month with the three pages they have been given. Without fail, they continue to advance this story of a potential vigilante serial killer radio host and how Debbie (the radio host’s producer) and her retired vigilante father Oddball try and determine the true culprit.

My favourite part of this month’s backup is how Hester depicts Debbie and her father apparently putting the pieces together in this case. He does this by changing up the paneling of the page from page to page. On the first page, the panels are actually puzzle pieces and as the story progresses, the pieces/panels start coming together to finally form a complete page. Amazing use of the visual format that is comic books.