Goofus and Gallant

I Hate Gallant Girl trade paperback

This is a series I’d actually been really interested in getting when it first came out, but I ended up missing every issue. When I saw that it was out in a trade paperback, I figured it was a great opportunity to read it.

The story is by Jim Valentino and Kat Cahill with art by Seth Damoose. Backstory: the Fellowship of Freedom has a pageant every decade to select a new Gallant Girl. One of the newest candidates, Miss Maine, Renee Tempete, is plenty frustrated that she wasn’t chosen — she’s got pretty awe-inspiringly powerful abilities, and the new Gallant Girl doesn’t have any powers at all. But she is a buxom blonde, and Renee is a less-well-endowed brunette, and that’s all the Fellowship really cares about. After Renee later puts a major smackdown on a giant robot attacking the airport, the Fellowship’s leader, the Commander, offers a position with the team — as Gallant Girl’s stand-in. Renee would do all the work, and Gallant Girl would get all the credit.

One of the Fellowship members, Blue Thunder, takes Renee under his wing, and she makes her own debut as a heroine called Tempest, completely upstaging Gallant Girl. And Renee soon discovers that there are some seriously bad characters running around the superhero world. Can she get to the bottom of all this without getting killed?

Verdict: Thumbs down. I like Renee as a character, and I thought the art was really great. But the entire story builds toward an ultimate confrontation between Renee and Gallant Girl, and when the confrontation finally gets here — it falls flat, and the entire thing is deferred ’til later. They were probably hoping to get another comic series out of it, but that never really developed. All in all, this story probably would’ve been pretty good if it had run for four issues, but because it only ran for three, it ends up being no fun.