Granny Goodness has been through some mess y’all…

Female Furies #1
Writer: Cecil Castellucci
Artist: Adriana Melo
Inks: Hi-Lo
Letters: Carlos M. Mangual
Covers: Mitch Gerads; Francesco Mattina
Editor: Brittany Holzherr; Jamie S. Rich
DC Comics

Reading this comic I kept hearing It’s A Man’s World in my head, as Apokalips is the very worst version of that trope. This first issue gives us a look into how Darkseid came into power and see just how instrumental Granny Goodness was to that. It also shows how, no matter what planet you’re on, being a woman isn’t easy. Cecil Castelluci, writer of Shade, The Plain Janes and Moving Target: A Princess Leia Adventure does an excellent, in fact brutal, job of showing how women are used, played against each other, dismissed and discarded. She also, painfully, shows how systemic that toxic mindset becomes and how ingrained it is in culture. We watch as Granny, still desperate for Darkseid’s respect even after all these years, willingly inflicts the same emotional and mental abuse on the Furies that was given to her. We also see how the Furies have, unknowingly, become complicit in their own abuse. The line ‘It’s because she looks like that. She’s asking for attention.’ hits so unbelievably close to home that I needed a minute to step away from the book.

Adriana Melo and Hi-Lo do a mostly fantastic job of illustrating the storyline, giving us complex fight scenes, quiet moments and some truly heartbreaking panels. There’s one misstep, however, of a fairly crucial moment for the characters of Auriele and Barda, that’s not illustrated to its fullest. The fall down in quality in that one panel threw me hard because everything that is drawn, before and after, is just so damn good.

Overall I’m definitely adding Female Furies to my pull list going forward and hope this mini-series turns into an ongoing.

Four Boom Tubes out of Five