Joy Operations vol. 2

The Jonado Trust was left a shambles after the events of the first volume, but its former EN.VOI, Joy and Hampton, the EN.VOI living in her head, are doing all right for themselves.  Joy’s family has had to decamp to the Peachtree Trust, but they’re making do even as its leader is secretly trying to recreate the circumstances that led to two minds sharing the same body.  That’s small potatoes compared to what’s going on outside, as there are people in Jonado who haven’t forgotten what Joy and Hampton did and they’re certainly not about to forget it.

The first volume of “Joy Operations” was notable for having a clever metafictional gimmick at the start before it devolved into rote sci-fi action shenanigans.  Even as artist Stephen Byrne is good at creating a slickly realized future world and action scenes that are equally so, sci-fi worldbuilding has never been Bendis’ strong suit and that remains true here.  Worse still is that there’s a lot of characters talking at each other, but precious little actual characterization going on.  Nor  is there much actual story to speak of as the plot involves the cast running around and dealing with the fallout from the previous volume and not doing anything to push things forward.

In short, no this is definitely not worth the $25 cover price for this collection.  I probably would’ve let this sit on my To Buy list even longer had I realized that this was a four-issue miniseries as opposed to a five-issue one.  If anyone was hoping that “Fortune & Glory:  The Musical” was going to herald better things from Bendis in the creator-owned space, they can keep waiting.  Time to see if the “Powers” revival (or his much-rumored return to Marvel) heralds better things from this once-reliable writer.