Review by Frank Plowright

Although again designated volume one, Fix Everything in fact continues the Wasp’s adventures from Agents of G.I.R.L., with Jeremy Whitley picking up where he left off, this time with the Japanese Gurihiru team handling the art. Now calling herself Nadia Van Dyne, Nadia is running the Genius In Action Research Labs (G.I.R.L.), combining her crimefighting career with generating new technology. The original Wasp, Janet Van Dyne, and Mockingbird act as mentors and overseers to the group of scientific geniuses the still teenage Nadia has gathered. As both Wasps are featured, Whitley switches the narrative viewpoints between them, Nadia’s captions generally being light and optimistic while Janet’s present a person with greater responsibilities.

Gurihiru is the alias for the team of Chifuyu Sasaki and Naoko Kawano, and as they’ve done elsewhere, they bring a strong sense of graphic design to their cartooning, combined with really expressive people. Everyone looks good, everyone is dressed well, and everyone has a visual personality that sometimes transcends their written one.

Whitley feeds present day science knowledge into the stories, explaining the ideas and then often having the G.I.R.L. team extrapolate matters further. The result is neat stuff both in passing and with a bearing on greater plots. The best aspect, however is Nadia’s characterisation. While too many of her colleagues are similar mouthpieces for dialogue, Nadia is well developed, Whitley considering her parentage and coming to an interesting conclusion, yet one that’s very logical based on how he’s developed her so far. Better still, it’s not trivialised. At times the final chapter seems as if it’s a disguised self-help manual, but there’s enough entertainment in the remainder to compensate, and although the discussion is perhaps extended too far, if it helps a single reader then that’s a trivial complaint. Whitley’s good at cliffhanger endings to his episodes, and that extends to the final page, leading us into G.I.R.L. vs. A.I.M.