Nancy Drew - a Dynamite Comics mini-series ("The Case of the Cold Case")

Take two of my favorite things, combine them, and you're bound to have a guaranteed success story, right?  Well, not necessarily.  Last year, Dynamite Comics acquired the rights to a number of the Stratemeyer Syndicate properties and published a mini-series, "The Big Lie," starring Nancy Drew and the Hardy Boys.  It was very noir and centered around the Hardy Boys being accused of murdering their own father.  The story was a bit dark, but the author stayed true to Nancy, Frank, and Joe's characters, making it a mostly enjoyable read.

This year, Dynamite took a different route and allowed an entirely different creative team to tell a solo Nancy Drew mystery story - "The Case of the Cold Case."  Written by Kelly Thompson with art by Jenn St. Onge,  I always try to reserve any judgments until after I read the story as a whole, despite the number of complaints that I heard from fans up front, before the series even started:  "George is a lesbian?!" "Nancy wouldn't dress like that!!"  "Nancy never lived in Bayport!!" etc.  I realize that any time you cross mediums (from book to film, from comic to film, from book to comic, etc.), there are going to be some changes, whether creative, licensing, or otherwise.  Sometimes those changes can be good, sometimes they can be bad - it all depends on how they are handled.

With that introduction out of the way, "The Case of the Cold Case" had a pretty good mystery to it, definitely more long the lines of the Nancy Drew Files series rather than the Nancy Drew Mystery Stories series.  Nancy, who now lives in River Heights and has been away from her hometown of Bayport (where, yes, the Hardy Boys live, too), is drawn back to Bayport when she receives a mysterious note that hints at her mother's passing some years ago.  Never one to turn down a mystery, she returns to Bayport, meets back up with her friends George Fayne and Bess Marvin, as well as Frank and Joe Hardy, meets a handsome new friend in Pete, and stumbles across a body while investigating.  (And yes, Nancy figures out pretty quickly, as do readers, that Pete is the one who sent Nancy the message - he needs her help solving his mother's murder, which the police wrote off as a suicide because they could not be bothered to investigate).  The gang investigates further and discovers that there is something very strange going on, and when Nancy and Bess are witness to another murder, and then Bess is kidnapped, it's a race against time to rescue Bess, reveal the identity of the crooks, and stop the smuggling ring that has set up shop in Bayport!

The mystery was certainly worthy of Nancy Drew, the investigation followed in true Nancy Drew form, using every resource available - online computer search, the good ol' fashioned library, flashlights in dark caves, midnight stake-outs and such.  Nancy's friends stayed involved and helped, but as in any Nancy Drew story, she remained the focus, and she is ultimately the one who figures it all out.  The breakout character in the series is definitely Bess Marvin.  Finally, after more than 85 years of publication, Bess Marvin is portrayed exactly as she should be!!!!  Always described as "pleasantly plump," the artists in the book never drew her that way - she was always stick-figure thin like Nancy and George.  In this series, though, Bess has some extra weight (not overly done or caricature-like), although she still retains that blond, curvy beauty that makes Bess who she is.  Further, she may be a bit nervous and frightened, Thompson writes her as determined and willing to overcome those fears to help out her friend.  She even surprises everyone when she comes up with information regarding the big party that could reveal more clues to help Nancy with her investigation.  Definitely not the dumb-bunny most people would assume the blond in the group is!  I fell so much in love with this version of Bess Marvin that I would love to see her in her own series (but I'm not holding out any hope that will ever happen...).  I also loved the chapter cliffhangers - now, I know, in comics, it is pretty standard for multi-issue stories to have cliffhangers at the end of each issue to leave the reader hanging and wanting more. But this worked perfectly with Nancy Drew, since her books are known for their chapter cliffhangers, and Thompson did a bang-up job of giving some pretty good cliffhangers at the end of each issue (and even at the end of the story!).

Now, on to some things that I did not like about the book, and a few things that should have never, ever been in the book.  First, before anyone gets concerned, no, I had no problems with George being gay.  Yes, the books always described her as a tomboy with a boy's name who liked sports, despised dresses and girlish things, so it was rather stereotypical for Thompson to write her as a gay woman.  It may have been a bit more creative if George had been straight and Bess, the uber-feminine of the three, had been gay.  But that's neither here nor there.  George being gay was no big deal, and thankfully, Thompson did not make it a big deal.  She did not push it in the reader's faces or turn it into a huge platform about gay rights.  What did bother me, more than anything else in this series, was the use of the word "goddamn" by the characters.  Had it been the villains or some previously unknown supporting character, I would not have liked it, but I could have passed over it.  No, Thompson, for whatever reason, felt compelled to have Nancy say it (issue 1), Frank say it (issue 2), and George say it (issue 3).  I'm not a prude or anything - I realize that people cuss, and I know this comic was aimed at adults, not children - but let's face it, the characters of Nancy Drew, Frank Hardy, and George Fayne would never cuss.  Period.  And the use of the words in the story are wholly unnecessary to the situations. The little Halloween give-away promotional book that Dynamite did, reprinting the first half of issue 1, proves that, as Dynamite removed the word - and guess what?  It made absolutely no difference to the story, the characters, or the intention of the dialogue!  Which proves to me that it was unnecessary and thrown in there to somehow make Nancy appear more adult, perhaps, or maybe more "relevant" to today's comic readers?  I don't know, but for me, it detracted from my enjoyment of the story.

Something else that was more likely an editorial issue than anything else was the changing of Bess's name.  In issue 1, she was correctly called Bess Marvin.  In issues 2 and 3, for reasons unknown, she is suddenly Bess "Martin" (with a "t' instead of a "v'). Then, in issues 4 and 5, she is back to Bess Marvin again.  Is it just me, or does it seem like editors (both in comics and in books) no longer truly EDIT books, but they simply manage the books, perhaps even stay involved in the marketing of the books.  I find more spelling, grammar, and continuity errors in comics and books than I ever did 10 or 20 years ago.  For self-published comics and books, I give some leeway, as there is oftentimes no editor involved in those; but for comics and books published by the big companies, particularly when the comic specifically identifies an EDITOR, it bothers me that blatant and obvious mistakes like that make it through.  It was already jarring that Nancy, Bess, and George are transported to Bayport for their hometown (the fact that Thompson indicated in early interviews that she was a big fan, but later interviews, she admitted to only reading a few of the books, leads me to think her desire to tell this story stemmed from Dynamite's previous story, "The Big Lie," where everything took place in Bayport - although Nancy was never said to be from Bayport in that story, I can see that Thompson may have misinterpreted it and assumed Nancy was from there), so to change her last name like that would give longtime fans cause to question Thompson's genuine care for the character and her history.

One final thing that bothered me about the writing was the way Frank and Joe were portrayed.  The instant attraction between Joe and Bess was fun (very reminiscent of the '70s television show and some of the Nancy Drew/Hardy Boys SuperMysteries), but the fact that Frank and Joe were somewhat bumbling and not at all on par with Nancy Drew when it comes to solving mysteries did not work. I understand Thompson wanted Nancy to truly shine in this story, but it was extremely out of character for Frank and Joe to be merely "back-up" for Nancy and not side-by-side with her solving the crime.  Frank and Joe have been at mystery-solving for longer than Nancy, and I am left to wonder why Thompson used them in the first place, instead of simply having Ned, Burt, and Dave in the story instead.  Again, this was the writer's choice, and while I understand that changes are made when you cross mediums, if you don't stay true to an established character's history, personality, and skill-set, you run the risk of turning away and losing fans of the characters.

Overall, I enjoyed the story, I absolutely LOVED Bess, and I would certainly buy a sequel mini-series (which I'm assuming has to at least be in the planning stages judging by that cliffhanger on the last panel of issue 5!).  I just hope that if Thompson does write a sequel, she does a bit more research and reading into the Nancy Drew books to capture more than just a cursory essence of who and what Nancy Drew is.  (PLUS - love the fact that for the variant covers, they used the same font and style from the original yellow-spine books from back in the day!)

RATING:  7 crates of suspicious lobsters out of 10 for bringing Nancy Drew to a whole new generation of readers and welcoming her and her friends into the 21st century!