In DC’s I Am Not Starfire, Mandy is a young woman trying to make her way in life, under the constant pressure of being a celebrity superhero’s daughter with a mystery father, and no powers to speak of. It’s probably not that surprising that’s she’s got an attitude.

Typical teenager, Mandy is whatever her mother is not. In fact, she thinks herself of the “anti-Starfire.” What’s worse, there are fans of her mom at school, just to drive home how much not her mother she is She’s got a goth look and a dark outlook. More importantly, like generations of adolescents before her, Mandy is keeping secrets from the people around her. The only person Mandy can stand is her friend, Lincoln.

Mandy’s doing the normal balancing act of school, life and, of course, love. She’s got a crush, but there’s a lot of things between her and happiness. Her crush is the uber-popular girl in class, Claire. Claire seems nice, but man, her friends are jerks. So what’s a not-cool, not outgoing, not-superpowered girl to do?

Nothing in this YA title is going to come as a surprise, I think, to a sophisticated reading audience. Nonetheless, I think we can all completely feel where Mandy is at… (even if, as an adult, it feels a bit irritating.) Mandy’s secret is absolutely something that a high school student and their parent might find very relevant to their life. Her crush might even like her back, but Mandy is really not receptive to anyone actually liking her, which makes this more complicated that it otherwise might be. However, like the rest of the plot complications, this has a happy ending for both girls and us. ^_^

Mariko Tamaki’s writing is approachable and Yoshi Yoshitani’s art is colorful, fun and very simple to follow. What works best here is that this works well as a YA story. There’s nothing here that is creepy, or condescending, as is so often a problem with YA works. (I’m still salty about DC’s “Minx” line which had great content and the creepiest old-dudes-talking-about-young-girls name ever.) Aditya Bidikar’s lettering is readable, and adds flavor where needed…like flavor boost icing on a very decent cake. ^_^

I’ve talked about how much I am not a DC fan here many times, and even though I really like Tamaki’s work, I probably wasn’t going to get this, but for two things. The puling of the *.*gaters was enough to make me put this on my to-get list and Okazu family member Chris L. mentioned that it was suitable for Okazu…and so it was.

The girl gets the girl, YA comics fans get something for them and everyone is happy except the over-sensitive manbabies who think everything has to be about them…and that, frankly is also good news for us. Because if it makes them unhappy, that means it’s ever so much more likely to be interesting and diverse. It’s like a big “Read This!” sign. Thank you, puling man babies for making it much easier to find good stuff to read. ^_^

Ratings:

Art – 7 More like YA than like DC.
Story – 7 Same
Characters – 7 Oddly, I really liked Claire.
Queer – 7
Service – 0

Overall – 7

A fun read, and I guess I’m going to have to stop saying I don’t like DC, because they are so vastly much better than Marvel right now at making puling manbabies unhappy.