Review: Marjorie Finnegan Temporal Criminal
Time travel! What a totally fascinating concept, right? Just think of all the possibilities... Being able to visit any point in history, to witness momentous occasions, meet the legends whose lives have shaped the very cultures of humankind from the dawn of time down through the ages... One could unravel untold mysteries, fully document the most significant events, enrich the scientific, artistic and philosophical potential of the entire human race!
... or you could just hop in and out of endless palaces, temples and mansions, looting every shiny piece of bling that you can grab hold of, using the miraculous technology you have had the blind luck to stumble across to hoard as much swag as humanly possible...
The titular protagonist of Marjorie Finnegan Temporal Criminal by writer Garth Ennis and artist Goran Sudžuka very much opts, with gleeful abandon, for the latter.
As you have probably deduced, this is a comedy. Marjorie - blonde, sexy and kick-ass - uses time travel as a means to an end, that end being major larceny on a truly legendary scale. Accompanied by Tim (who is just a head, and understandably rather bitter about this fact) and Doctor Twelve (her trusty shotgun) she drops in on the rich and infamous at various points in time to relieve them of their riches.
Of course, things don't always go to plan, and our history-hopping heroine often has to improvise, usually with astonishingly chaotic results, frequently including quite staggering amounts of bloody carnage...
All this fun is not without consequences, however. Hot on her heels is time cop Harriet, who just happens to be her sister; a sister with major unresolved sibling animosity (not, it has to be said, entirely without justification: Marjorie having been a merciless prankster in their youth). Also gunning for Marj is fellow time criminal Stan (red skin, horns, two penises, wearing just a cape, a skimpy pair of shorts and cowboy boots) and his associate, the self-styled Lord of Evil who is seeking a particularly vital manuscript amongst Marjorie's piles of historical plunder for his own nefarious machinations.
The ensuing shenanigans, in which sex and violence feature quite prominently, are peppered with some truly inventive profanities. For example, the annoying inconvenience of temporal paradoxes is all taken care of thanks to a device called the re-aligner (shifting the death of anyone significant to history into an alternate version), which Marjorie prefers to refer to as the "unfucker". This amelioration of history does not absolve Marj of her crimes however, thus her sister ("Goody Two Tits") continues to hound her.
The story thunders along at a satisfying pace and the artwork is slick and punchy, neatly rendering every expressive nuance that delivers the ironic twists required. The humour is dry, irreverent and uplifting; cynical yet with a warm-hearted edge. Both heroine and villain have a healthy disregard for authoritarian hypocrisy - particularly with reference to religion - but what could have been mishandled as 'woke' whinging is instead delivered with a canny on-the-nose adroitness.
Marjorie is having fun, causing havoc and flipping the bird, but for how long can the party last? Even for a temporal heist-meister, time is running out...
Marjorie Finnegan Temporal Criminal on AWA Studios
Zak Webber
Twitter - @sfcomicartist / Instagram - @sfcomicartist
JOIN US ON FACEBOOK! - SCI-FI COMIC NEXUS
*****
***
*
Comments
Post a Comment