Jem, the 80's animated TV show about an all-woman pop group, captured the decade's obsessions with image, celebrity, technology and wild neon-colored hair. Now, friends I haven't seen for almost 30 are back—as a comic book!
It's one of the best 80s toon reboots yet, avoiding the mangled relationships and mealy worldbuilding of Thundercats (2011), the inanity of Smurfs Take New York, and the vile CGI shitfucking of 2014's Ninja Turtles.
Best of all, it keeps the superficial style of the original while giving the characters form denied to them by the demands of first-run syndicated TV in 1985. And I mean form: Aja and Shana are built like brick houses and are hot.
It's awesome to see other women built like me—I can deadlift my husband—in a comic book that isn't using it as comic relief or to illustrate a generic "strong" female character. Jem is the star of this book, though, which casts her as a blandly attractive and stage-frightened pop starlet…until her dead father's secret supercomputer helps her find her outrageous alter ego.
Returning to the Holograms' jam sessions made me feel like a kid again—and even more like a kid when I spilled my drink on the page. The Misfits show up in #2 to complicate matters.
