Bad Girls (DC)

(DC, 2003–2004, 2009)
™ and © DC Comics, Inc.

Bad Girls is an innocuous mix of teen angst, high–school social structure, and super–powers. A geek even more nerdy than the young Peter Parker experiments with a liquid substance that imbues its user with super–strength, super-speed, or any number of other heightened abilities. The only catch is that it only works on females—so the boy genius can’t use the super–serum to get even with the gang of bullies who always pick on him. The plot thickens, when a group of snobby girls accidentally drinks the water–like formula.

The cute and sexy cover (by Darwin Cooke) gives the issue presence on the comics racks, but the Vertigo–style interior art, which is rough and sketchy (but not without merit), doesn’t fit the lighthearted tone of the story. Ditto the muted colors (by Lee Loughridge). Another problem is the strange liquid, since it’s never really explained in any depth—a simple pseudo–scientific rationale would have sufficed.

What does resonate (at least in a cartoonish way) are the characters and the high-school setting. There’s the cute girl misfit who’s not quite popular (à la early Buffy Summers), the nerdy nebbish who gets his head flushed in the toilet, and the snobby girls who are unimpressed with the new kid in town until she accidentally starts a fire in the chem lab. The best scene is the one in which all the kids are thinking the same thing: “Why can’t I be cool like everyone else?”

— Brett Weiss

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