Re-read to assess whether or not to keep it in my collection - a resounding YES! ( )

Started out whatever. The art was really bad, the story predictable, trite, and definitely a case of preaching to the choir.

By the end it was little more then a comic punk's wet dream. I feel their pain, but this is just an insipid piece of shallow un-creativity. ( )

Teenagers from Mars enters a strange meta world. In the city of Mars comic books are reviled by adults and loved by the youth, who act in direct rebellious opposition. The main character is a young comic artist, who falls for a girl and in order to empress her performs an act of vandalism, which quickly spirals out of control.

The book isn't meant to be real life and it certainly riffs off real situations (the comic book scare of the fifties with its panicked parents and burning of books), but it exaggerates it, bringing it to the point of satire. The line between youth and adulthood is perfectly clear. Adults (with a few exceptions of drug addled hippies) are suit-wearing fascists, who blow things out of proportion and hate comics. Adults, the book declares, have something missing, and this is made clear by the fact that several of the most dangerous antagonists are literally missing body parts.

Meanwhile, the teens and the kids are the epitome of cool. They rob graves, go to parties and get painted up as zombies (both of which make me now note the theme of death and dirt as further separate from the sterile environs of the adults), and they have a devil-may-care/rebel-without-a-cause fatalistic attitude. And in a way, they are cool (sometimes I really want to have the ability to just not give a sh*t), and the kids do relate to each other in ways that are meaningful.

Similar to many superhero comic stories, and perhaps inspired by them, the clear duality of good and evil sets the plot up to follows the tropes of a hero creation myth. How do our wayward teens strike out against the fascism of the adults, how do they fight back?

Overall like both the art and the story better here than I did reading Rick Spears and Rob G.'s other book Dead West, though even here the quality of the drawings fluctuates and some panels seem to have been handled more lazily than others, which is rather annoying when it happens during a full page dramatic scene. I'm not really sure where I stand on Teenagers from Mars. I kind of want to like it, but in the end I kind of don't. So, I guess I'll just sit in the middle somewhere and see what others think. ( )