Burnout - new Minx!

This week Burnout arrived, a new Minx graphic novel written by Rebecca Donner and illustrated by Inaki Miranda.

The Minx graphic novel line is an offshoot of DC Comics and was created to attract more of the female, young reader audience. I think the really good Minx titles such as Plain Janes and Good As Lilly (and now Burnout) cross reader demographics and it's great that writers and artists new to the comic book medium have another outlet and audience to share their stories with.

Burnout's central character is Danni, who, due to a move brought on by her mother, develops a crush on her soon to be stepbrother, Haskell. Burnout isn't about how odd getting into a relationship with your stepbrother can be, rather it's about ecoterrorism, with Haskell being on the side of nature who also believes that he and others should do things to companies that are encroaching upon nature's beauty through violent means if necessary (such as tree spiking). Danni starts out helping Haskell in his crusade against loggers, but increasingly becomes conflicted with what she's doing. Burnout isn't preachy about taking a stance on the side of loggers or environmentalists, instead Rebecca Donner shows through her engaging characters Danni and Haskell, who are dealing with their problems at home and their budding relationship, that the world is a complex place and there are no easy answers.

Personally, I'm more on the side of environmentalists than the big corporations / companies who are largely only thinking of their profit margins, not what their actions are doing to this planet, but I don't advocate endangering workers (such as loggers) by tree spiking (although from what I've read on this tactic, most tree spikers spike trees high enough that loggers wouldn't get hurt) or some of the approaches of PETA (People For The Ethical Treatment of Animals), who in their extremism often give vegetarians a bad name. At the same time, Danni, in Burnout, comes to an epiphany that "sometimes you have to do something extreme for people to take notice." It is true that a lot of our countries formative years in history show that change occured by people having these realizations and acting upon them. I think that as our world gets increasingly complex, with more people who need more resources, that the hard questions need to be asked / examined of what the cost of taking or not taking actions to change things is.