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Skelly, Katie – Nurse Nurse

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nursenurse1

Nurse Nurse

Hooray for this being a completed series! Which is probably an odd thing to say, granted, but I saw the first issue for this ages ago and was afraid that it was one of many series that just sort of petered out. Not so! This story is set far into the future (3030, to be exact) at a time when nurses are being sent out to help out with various illnesses that colonists are coming down with while settling different planets. Earth has long since had a population explosion, so they’re forced to take some risks in keeping humanity growing. Why this constant expansion is always assumed to be a good thing is rarely explained in science fiction stories, but don’t mind an old crank like me, as that has nothing at all to do with this story. Anyway, the main nurse is Gemma, and her fellow nurses sabotage her right off the bat when they get to Venus. On Venus she discovers a mysterious gooey substance that comes from butterflies and seems to be causing people to hallucinate/fall in love with each other. She eventually gets reassigned to Mars, but a butterfly sneaks onboard her ship as she leaves, causing all kinds of problems. This was an eight issue series, but apparently the eighth issue was never released, so even if you were awesome enough to keep up with this series you still don’t know how it ends. Other things that I can mention without spoiling anything probably? Space pirates! Clones! Pandaface! Shooting the leg off a guy! Meeting the most popular band in the universe! A malfunctioning ship! There, that should be vague enough for you to not know what I’m talking about. This series is a pile of fun, especially because the small press comics world does damned little in the way of smart science fiction (or any science fiction at all, really). More like this please, and Katie has left herself a little room for more of these stories, so maybe if everybody reading this buys this book that’ll make it an easy call for her. $15

nursenurse2

Skelly, Katie – Nurse Nurse #1

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Nurse Nurse #1

This comic reads like a wish list of things that I had wanted to see in Katie’s comics without even being consciously aware of that fact. A continuing series? Check, with at least four more issues planned. A science fiction story? Check again, with this one being set in 3030. Katie spending some serious time and effort on backgrounds and imaginative settings? Nailed it again. This issue tells the story of three nurses trying to get a permanent job on a human settlement on Venus, which is the happening place to be at the moment. Only two of them can get the job, so the two friends (Junny and Nina) set up the other nurse (Gemma) to oversleep in her chryogenic stasis, giving off a bad impression right off the bat. This issue only has time to introduce us to the characters and establish Venus a little bit, and things end off with Gemma just getting to meet her first patient. I’m intrigued, I’m excited to see more, I’m thrilled that Katie is putting out so many books these days, and it doesn’t hurt a thing that the stories are all over the place. In case you were wondering where all the good mini comics are these days, you might want to think about looking in this direction… $3