MS MYSTIC DEATHWATCH 2000 #1 Continuity Comics, 1993

Holy cats, Ms Mystic sure is in trouble on that cover! She’s being attacked by a pterodactyl and a swarm of bees!

Oh, wait. Actually, that’s a special optical illusion cover, not a swarm of bees. If you stare at the two dots on the cover long enough, the big blob of bees congeals into a shape that approximates Ms Mystic’s body. Or so they tell me; I’ve never been able to make the damn thing work.

Comic book artist/living legend Neal Adams created Continuity Comics, a small publisher that put out books like Toy Boy, Valeria the She-Bat, and Ms Mystic. The books weren’t all drawn by Adams, but they were drawn by other artists in a Neal Adams “house style,” so they all had a consistent look to them. The other thing the Continuity books had in common was their total, utter suckiness. I mean, come on: Toy Boy?

Ms Mystic is no exception. This particular issue leads up to a big crossover that nobody really cared about called Deathwatch 2000, which unfortunately had nothing to do with David Carradine. Adams wrote the overall story, but Peter Stone did the dialogue and pencillers Dwayne Turner and Ernesto Infante handled the art, turning in their best faux-Adams artwork.

It is awful.

Ms Mystic is the type of heroine that only a man could have created. She flies around in a zipatone bodysuit worrying about the Earth and all it’s innocent creatures, and although we are told that she has incredible elemental powers and “almost precognitive intelligence” we have to sort of take their word for it, because she can’t seem to take care of herself and acts, well… stupid.

A big chunk of this comic involves Ms Mystic getting molested by a pterodactyl. While that’s not necessarily a bad thing, I’m not sure how this advances the plot to the big Deathrace 2000 storyline.

Here’s Ms Mystic in the grips of Big Bird:



You see how I have refrained from an obvious and tasteless joke? Do you marvel at my restraint, reader?

Ms Mystic talks like that through the whole issue, in weird disjointed phrases held together by the most ellipses I’ve ever seen in a comic book. Here’s some sample dialogue as the pterodactyl drops her in its lair:

“My sword! Can’t hurt it…”

“…it’s still an innocent creature… just surviving…" [she gets bitten in arm] " MY ARM! It knew the sword was a threat… and twarted it! HUARG!”

No, that’s not a spelling error on my part. It really reads “…and twarted it! HUARG!”

Ms Mystic gets knocked into the jungle below by the pterodactyl, where she is conveniently rescued by a big Swamp Thing/Toxic Avenger guy, who takes her to a cave to recover. Then the Toxic Avenger guy’s brother Arky Conde (really, that’s his name) shows up and stumbles upon the unconscious Ms Mystic. Where is she anyway, The World’s Smallest Jungle?

Apparently Ms Mystic has had a prior relationship with this Arky cat, who from all accounts is No Damn Good. But he’s sooo cute! Here’s Ms Mystic acting as a role model for all the young girls out there (click to enlarge):



“You hurt my… planet.”

Girl, have some respect for yourself - the guy’s obviously an asshole! What happened to Ms Mystic’s precognitive intelligence? You see what I mean when I say this must have been written by a guy? You’d never catch Gail Simone writing a scene like that.

It gets worse.

I have to admit, I sort of started to lose focus and didn’t read the rest of the comic as thoroughly as I should have – gimmicky optical effect comic book covers will do that to me. One scene did stand out, however: The Toxic Avenger/Swamp Thing guy meets Devilspawn, whose cause… and curse… is to save this planet from… DEATHRACE 2000!!!! Behold:



Somewhere buried in this crappy comic there is a message about CFCs and the ozone and pollution and the sanctity of all life on Earth, but man, you really have to dig for it. Reading this makes me want to find that issue of Toy Boy I have rotting around here in one of these boxes. I mean, it can’t be any worse than Ms Mystic Deathwatch #1, can it?

Can it?