Story by Doug Murray & Frank Cho
Art by Axel Medellin
In the final issue of the 50 Girls 50 limited series, the women of the ESS Savannah open a wormhole to return home, only to find it occupied by an alien craft with which they are destined to collide. The lead-up to the collision is suitably tense, but everything that comes afterward is a jumbled mess of hackneyed dialogue and awful fiction-science.
The second half of the issue is filled with half-explained teasers, undoubtedly meant to drive readers to the hopeful ongoing series. Unfortunately these teasers lack intrigue, instead serving to frustrate and alienate. The end of the book is wholly unsatisfying, failing to provide any unifying thread to the random, one-off fight-fests of issues 1 through 3, and offering no closure to the crew’s story whatsoever.
Perhaps the worst offense of 50 Girls 50 was the almost offensive character arc of the Savannah’s crew. In issue 3 we’re given a glimpse into their seemingly power-mad view of their mission, only to have that viewpoint reinforced here as though it’s unfailingly correct. None of the women in the book think to question the mindset of their captain or Oksana, which makes them not only two-dimensional, but completely unsympathetic.
Even Medellin’s art, which I thought was excellent in the first issue, has steadily declined over the course of the series, feeling more and more rushed and sloppy. Where he initially succeeded in differentiating characters through unique attributes, his figures are now almost identically constructed and his facial expressions so muddied that his women are now defined by their hair color and styles.
Although 50 Girls 50 started as a potentially interesting sci-fi adventure with a unique twist, each issue of its four-issue run has quickly marked it as nothing more than a disappointing, monster-of-the-month schlock-fest.
