Alias - Brian Michael Bendis with Michael Gaydos

 

I got this series from my comic-collecting brother along with the GL/GA books and while I had watched the Jessica Jones TV show, I never read the comics and have been pleasantly surprised by the quality.

The name Alias is, of course, the ironic name of Jessica Jones' private investigation agency and with her background as a superhero known to anyone who cares, her cases vary from the basic "spouse is cheating" to searching for missing mutants to rescuing one of the several "Spider-Women" that inhabit the Marvel Universe these days.

Of course, Jessica's personal life is basically a wreck, she is a chain-smoker and a functioning alcoholic, she has had many bad episodes in her life, her love life is a shambles (she has affairs with Luke Cage, Hero For Hire and Scott Lang, the most recent Ant-Man, among others) and her business barely stays afloat. But, she gets an occasional good-paying gig from the likes of Matt Murdock (she knows he's Daredevil, but doesn't know if he knows that she knows) and J. Jonah Jameson.

While I'm not a big fan of Gaydos' artwork, I do think that Bendis does a great job with the storylines and the cameos abound, from Steve Rogers to Carol Danvers to Rick Jones (or is he?!) to Jessica Drew and plenty of others. These seem logical rather than gratuitous given her background and they never overwhelm Jessica's story. There are lots of twists'n'turns and bits that I never saw coming, for whatever that's worth, but it all kept my attention.

Definitely worth checking out, especially if you're a fan of the TV show, but even if not, it's a fine series.

PS - I just realized that the imprint is MAX Comics - I can only assume that this is an adult-themed offshoot of Marvel since all of the Marvel characters are referenced. I'll have to look into that....