Jessica Jones and the Fear of Flying

Picked up the first volume of Marvel’s Alias trade paperbacks at Midgard Comics, pleased to see it begins exactly like the superb Netflix TV series it inspired, with an homage to the first scene in Chinatown (the PI showing a distraught man photos of his wife off the reservation).

As on TV, she throws him through her door when he gets tough, adding, “And then there’s the matter of your bill…”

The art by Michael Gaydos is unromantic, deliberately muddy, noir-ish, suggesting a world apart from the bright moral clarity of the traditional superheroes. And the writing by Brian Michael Bendis undermines and winks at superhero fantasy in subtle ways, as when a cop asks Jessica if she can fly and she replies, “Not really... I can take off, all right? But I can't -- I can't really land that well. So I just don’t do it all that much. Like most things in this world, it’s not all that it's cracked up to be -- flying. Trust me.”

“You ever meet the Fantastic Four? Love the FF,” her interrogator asks.

“I met the big orange guy once.”

“The Thing.”

“Sure."