Rest assured, the Laurie in this book does NOT fill out the costume like that.

As I’ve said previously, I was not looking forward to anything spectacular coming from the Before Watchmen books. Before Watchmen: Silk Spectre #1 has done nothing to change that opinion. With a script by Darwyn Cooke and Amanda Conner, and artwork by Amanda Carter, this book has done nothing to add to the Watchmen mythos.

Before Watchmen: Silk Spectre #1 tells the story of high school aged Laurie Jupiter. Laurie, as we learned in Watchmen, is the daughter of the original Silk Spectre, and is being trained by her mother to replace her. The story is full of “lost child of the 60s” cliches, Laurie getting bullied by the popular girls, meeting and falling for the local teen hunk, living with a mother who just doesn’t understand her. With the exception of being attacked late at night by her own mother as a “training exercise”, this is the type of story that I would leave the room while my daughter enjoys a night of ABC Family programming. Perhaps I should have her read this book and see if it whets her appetite for more.

The artwork by Amanda Carter is top notch, and the writing team does put together a story that makes us understand where Laurie is coming from, but again, the schism between her and her mother was well documented in the original book, and this issue does nothing to add to that story. While this is not an exceedingly bad book (like Before Watchmen Minutemen #1), I can not, in good conscience, recommend that it be something that anything but speculators (who will assuredly be disappointed in its earning potential) pick up.

About Mark Driscoll

When not ranting about the current state of his favorite comics or working on L33t, Mark spends a majority of his time renovating his newly purchased, 120 year old Victorian house. Badly. He is very bad at talking about himself in the third person, as he thinks it make him sound pretentious.

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