Mara #3
Written by Brian Wood
Art by Ming Doyle
Colors by Jordie Bellaire
Image Comics
Release Date: March 6, 2013
Cover Price: $2.99

There’s this familiar feeling I got after reading the first two issues of the Image Comics series Mara that I couldn’t put my finger on, which is funny because the premise of the book – a beautiful athlete in the future competes in professional volleyball – has been praised for being unique. And it certainly is, but I realized that the book was reminding me of David Foster Wallace’s notorious tome Infinite Jest, the 1,100 page novel being set largely in a tennis academy where young people train to compete in a media landscape vastly different then the one we know. The novel and the comic also have a captivating protagonist with some sort of shameful secret and peripherally circling both of them are an array of bizarre human beings with their own askewed political agendas. Look, it’s far, far from a being a perfect parallel, like I said, but there’s just something there that brings it to my mind.

Now with Mara, things take a much different turn (let me quickly throw up a **SPOILER WARNING** for issues 1 and 2 for this upcoming paragraph)…