Review: C.J. Carella's Armageddon Girl (or how Keanu Reeves got wiped out of existence)
Rating: 4 out of 5
Date: 01 15, 2014
Should ARMAGEDDON GIRL ever make it to a cinematic adaptation, I vote that Felicia Day play the lead role. ARMAGEDDON GIRL is first in C.J. Carella's New Olympus series. It's a story that blends in alternate history and superhero tropes. If only Carella had thrown in time travel, he would've hit my favorite trifecta. Christine Dark is our point-of-view character. She's 21, a redhead, and a massive nerd. Christine Dark is a math genius and into RPGs and a social misfit and I did mention Felicia Day, didn't I? The first few pages track her as she has a horrible time of it at a frat party in Ann Arbor, Michigan. She steps out for a bit of vomiting and ends up falling thru the world. When she wakes up, she's suddenly in New York City... but a New York City set in a parallel world. And, oh yeah, she's being abducted.I'm into underdog stories, and the behind-the-scenes stuff to ARMAGEDDON GIRL is most definitely of the underdog variety. ARMAGEDDON GIRL happens to be a successful kickstarter project that met over 200% of its initial goal (over a 31-day period, the writer sought pledges to total a $2,500 goal; he ended up with $5,178). As an extra treat, we get the black and white, chapter opening illustrations by artists Maryanne Fry and Delia Gable. But does C.J. Carella do his backers a solid?I think he does. Once I got used to Christine's stream-of-consciousness jibber-jabber (as my gramps used to say) and the frequent drops of pop culture references, I enjoyed the book tremendously. And as the story progresses, Carella does somewhat tone down his try to be hip. I love his worldbuilding. It's obvious that he thought things thru, from how certain everyday tech gadgets are different (ie: wrist-comms instead of cell phones) all the way up to geopolitical shifts. Part of the fun is Christine trying to identify the point of divergence from her home world (which she dubs "Earth Prime") to her new world ("Earth Alpha"). Carella juggles a sprawling cast of capes & cowls, not a few of whom are obvious nods to familiar superheroes. Someone beat me to it, but perhaps my favorite wink of the eye revolves around a certain Time Lord. Only it's not a British police box that this guy travels in.Christine's new world is populated by over five thousand Neolympians (a word coined by Hitler during the 1936 Olympics; good looking out, Hitler). Neolympians are categorized into three tiers: Type 1's are the minor parahumans; Type 2's are fairly formidable supers; Type 3's are those in the neighborhood of the Wonder Woman/Superman power level. The No-Face Vigilante is a badassss Type 2 hero, meaning he can lift around 20,000 pounds. No-Face has got a pretty cool/creepy power: his face can assume anyone else's resemblance. Otherwise, when he's at rest, his face is just this blank blob of flesh. No-Face's preferred bailiwick is the five buroughs encompassing New York City. He'd rather not stray beyond those boundaries. He shouldn't have rescued that kidnapped girl then.It's hard not to like Christine Dark, never mind that she's a walking run-on sentence. I loved her big-eyed reactions to each revelation in her crazy new environs. Her pop culture references are hit and miss for those around her because some of those references have no grounding on Earth Alpha (for example, there's no Keanu Reeves, so her throwaway comment about The Matrix just sails over people's heads). And it's hard not to like the No-Face Vigilante (let's call him Mark) who is this hard-as-nails hombre whose prickly, tough guy exterior only a very few can penetrate, Christine immediately becoming of those.The perspective shifts chapter to chapter from Christine to Mark to select members of the global super-team, Freedom Legion, to several of the baddies. I mentioned earlier that Christine is the point-of-view character as, thru her, we learn about Earth Alpha. But you could say the same for Mark as he becomes our point-of-view character as the primary observer of Christine as she experiences Earth Alpha and discovers her set of super-powers. Oh, yeah, we find out fairly quickly that Christine herself is a Neolympian. The mystery revolves around exactly what it is she's capable of.By introducing the Freedom Legion, Carella's narrative takes on a wider canvas. Key members of the super-team go back to the genesis of the parahuman, and it's in these chapters that we get personal perspectives of this alternate history. It takes a moment for the Freedom Legion arc to intersect with Christine and Mark's arcs but when they finally do, we get a clue as to how ambitious a story Carella is telling. The action is epic and so intense. Christine is a fast learner. By the end of the book, several questions are answered, more are raised. It's fun trying to catch all the references (the nods to Doctor Who, Doc Savage, the Shadow, and D!ck Tracy are obvious; there are more obscure nods). The writing isn't perfect. I think it could've done with some tightening (Chapter One reads like a gushing fanboy wrote it). But Carella made me care about the characters and the worldbuilding is in-depth, fascinating, thought-provoking. Will Christine Dark change the world, as that one super-seer prophesied? There has to be a reason why the forces of darkness are so relentless in their pursuit of her. Maybe that'll be answered in the upcoming sequel DOOMSDAY DUET. But I say speed it up with the movie adaptation. Felicia Day ain't getting younger.