As with so many other comics I pick up from the library, Michael Moreci’s The Joneses caught my attention with its cover, featuring a superhero family consisting of a black man, Marcus, his white wife, Sonya, and their biracial children. X-Men? Fantastic Four? The Incredibles? Well, it’s a little of all the above, floundering in its own mediocrity.
When I reflect on The Joneses, I think about how bad-faith detractors rage about creating original characters of diverse ethnic backgrounds instead of changing the race of established characters. This comic strikes me as a response to said detractors. The effort and the result are milquetoast at best and bootleg at worst. Even one of my kids makes a drive-by comment that the family’s daughter, Agatha, looks like Zendaya. I had not noticed this before they pointed it out, but it’s true and hilarious.
Very much like the Incredible family, the Joneses are super-powered but keep their abilities secret while trying to maintain an anodyne suburban life. However, they are Reborn—practically mutants without running into the legal ramifications with Marvel—created out of the ashes of the Great Death, a pandemic that killed millions. Like mutants in the Marvel universe, being a Reborn is subject to public scrutiny. Sonya and Marcus even attend a community meeting where someone calls for a neighborhood watch to report any Reborn sightings.
The twist is that one of the neighborhood watch women is a Reborn herself, and joins the watch with the ulterior motive to detect other Reborn and recruit them in a plot to take over the city. What takes place, then, is a family rivalry between the Dillons and the Joneses.
The culminating battle is the most interesting part of this book even if practically everything seems borrowed from a: Marcus’ powers remind me of The Guyver; Agatha is a hotshot like Johnny Storm but with Quicksilver’s super speed; Tommy has the powers of teleportation like Nightcrawler; and Sonya’s abilities, while not as readily identifiable, remind me of an unstable Jean Grey Phoenix. Yet Sonya argues with Marcus like Helen Parr argues with Bob about their powers—he wants to be a good guy while fear paralyzes her. Meanwhile at school, Agatha uses her powers to beat kids who are bullying her little brother, Tommy, moving too fast for them to see who is throwing the punches.
So many segments of The Joneses I have seen elsewhere, and thus, I would sooner recommend the source material before this low-stakes interpretation of those other, better stories.
Blerd Beats 