I’m on the record as loving Shade the Changing Girl/Woman, writer Cecil Castellucci’s last comic with artist Marley Zarcone at DC. It was beautifully weird, earnest and heartfelt and real, which is a ridiculous way to describe a book about an alien insanity vest that reanimates a dead teenager with the brain of an alien bird and learns to make friends. It was a wire to wire terrific comic that I’ve already gone back and reread.

I should have known that Adriana Melo was going to impress, too. She has been a quality artist since her time on Birds of Prey. And her work on Plastic Man with Gail Simone was really good. But I did not expect to get a good Kirby impression out of her!

Look at page 2 – everything on this page except for Granny’s eyes in the top panel is very Jack Kirby. The angles, Heggra’s eyebrows and rictus, even the silouhette panel feels like it could have been cribbed from the King’s ’70s series. The outfit is actually perfectly lifted from that book. I’m still trying to pinpoint why this stood out so strongly to me, but I think it’s how she’s inking herself. I think it’s a lot heavier than her usual inks, and that’s part of where that resemblance is coming from.

Here’s how DC describes the issue: