Amadan na Briona

I was a fan of Terry Moore's Strangers in Paradise, though that series went on way too long and began recycling storylines every volume. He writes real, human, messed-up but endearing characters, and then puts them in extreme situations. His stories are like taking the characters from one of the more intelligent rom-coms and suddenly sticking them in a gangster or sci-fi movie.

Also, his black and white art has a lush, hubba-hubba quality to it that's almost cheesecake (he likes decidedly "well-rounded" women) but manages not to be exploitative, nor does he portray anatomically improbable women in physically impossible poses with clothes that could not possibly stay on in said poses.

So, Moon Lake is the first volume in what's kinda sorta a superhero story. At least, it has the trappings of a "superhero origins" story - Julie Martin is a broke photographer who's clinging to denial while her husband pesters her to sign the divorce papers, when she happens to observe some sort of test going on above a desert Air Force base. While she's snapping pictures, the test pilot of an experimental super-suit gets blown out of the sky. By her own people. There are definitely government baddies here, though by the end of volume one we're still not sure which of the MIB are bad guys and which, if any, will turn out to be good guys.

The remains of the test pilot's supersuit rain down on the desert, and some of it attaches to Julie in molten metal droplets. They coalesce together in a silvery breastplate that attaches itself to her skin. She goes to a medical clinic to try to have it removed, with unpleasant results.

Meanwhile, of course, some other people saw the explosion, and a mentally-unbalanced vagrant also got some super-metal rained on him...

By the end of this volume, Julie is on the run from the MIB, with a park ranger who's the boyfriend of the woman who got blowed up on page one.

Not a very original premise, if you've read a lot of superhero comics, but like I said, Moore's schtick is writing real characters and putting them in unreal situations, so Julie is acting like a normal person would act when suddenly finding herself on the run from government agents with some sort of super-science liquid metal attached to her chest - i.e., she's freaking out.

Good art and fun story, and I want to see what happens when they meet the lethally-smart special agent and the psycho homeless guy.