Spoilers ahead.
What I liked:
• The artwork is nice, bold, expressive and slick.
• Despite my very limited knowledge of Nancy Drew - I read one book, 'The Secret of the Old Clock', and I have seen the Emma Roberts movie, and that's it - I had no trouble getting into this comic and keeping track of who everyone was. No overt confusion as far as I could tell. So I think it's accessible to newcomers as well as old school fans of the character.
• Nancy Drew's development from an independent, somewhat thoughtless and selfish lone wolf to a team player who keeps in touch with her friends and lets them in - on the mystery and case details, and on a personal, internal level, in going through her struggles and growth - is done decently.
• Aside from Nancy, a few others in the main cast are also memorable, distinct, and make an impression, like Bess and George.
• The scene where Nancy breaks down and pours her heart out to George privately, revealing how vulnerable she truly is, is well done.
• Nancy's not unreasonable and not irrational dislike and distrust of the police.
What I didn't like:
• Everything else.
• The mystery is...I'm sorry, but it sucks. It's crap. It's barely even a mystery. Realistically it would have been solved years ago without the aid of meddling kids.
I grew up watching countless detective shows with my dad, and I've read my fair share of mystery novels in my life, so maybe I am hard to impress when it comes to mystery plots. It often seems I've seen it all. I know what's familiar, and how these things go. I know the standard formula - the linear structure, who has the motive, the clues, the placement of the clues, the red herrings, standing back and looking at the bigger picture, etc. - and how it works. Nothing shocks or surprises me anymore.
However, even without all of that, I am positive I would still find the mystery in 'Nancy Drew: The Palace of Wisdom' to be more than lacklustre. It's vague, sloppy, and full of holes, contrivances, plot conveniences, and coincidences. After reading it to the end and looking back through it from the beginning, in some points I could say that a wizard or a ghost did it and it would've made as much sense.
Oh, and literally the one suspect that Nancy talks to turns out to be the killer, drug dealer and mastermind behind everything. Okay, maybe the new kid and love interest Pete counts as a suspect, but no one reading the comic would believe he is. Too obvious (like the one actual suspect, mind you, but bear with me here), and he is a POC, and a mainstream comic by an all-female team trying to be woke would not make such a mistake as making one of the few POC characters a villain.
• Further problems I had with the comic, starting with: Where is Nancy's dad?
Her mother dying years ago is made a big deal of - it's in the letter that motivates Nancy to return to Bayport from River Heights and start off the mystery, in fact - and it adds to her character development. But her father? He's in a few flashback panels, and then the comic just straight up forgets he exists.
Nancy is seventeen, and everything indicates that the comic is taking place during schooltime, so how is she able to move to Bayport, quick as a flash, and solve the mystery there with nothing getting in her way? And in the end, it is suggested that she will move back to Bayport after all (why she left in the first place, and never contacted her friends there the whole time she was away, is not really clear). Um, what about school? What about her dad, or whoever her legal guardian is? It's like the writer, Kelly Thompson, forgot that Nancy is a teen and not an adult after the first ten pages, where she is at school in River Heights.
• The lack of parental presence is even lampshaded a couple of times, when Nancy in narration brings up how Bess's parents are conveniently never home, leaving the teen team to use Bess's home as their base of operations. It doesn't excuse anything, least of all Nancy's dad's nonexistence, and it feels like lazy writing.
• The first major plot point in the mystery - aside from the threatening letter that got Nancy into Bayport in the first place - is Nancy descending into a cave, and someone trying to kill her by cutting her rope. All of her friends above are unconscious, presumably drugged. No further explanation is ever given.
Okay, this bugs me. No, it outright baffles me, to see something like this in what is supposed to be a serious mystery plot. It's part of the overall vagueness, convenience and contrivance I was talking about earlier.
I want to know: WHO THE HELL DRUGGED HER FRIENDS? HOW DID THEY DRUG THEM, ALL AT THE EXACT SAME TIME, SO NONE OF THEM KNOWS WHAT HAPPENED ONCE THEY'VE WOKEN UP? WAS MORE THAN ONE PERSON INVOLVED? Was it gas? If so then wouldn't there be aftereffects around? Wouldn't Pete, who conveniently found them and then Nancy in the cave at a convenient time, also be affected by the gas a little?
Ugh, moving on.
• Did this story need a big cast, that make up Nancy's friends in Bayport? There are six of them, and most of them are superfluous and hardly do anything. Not anything useful in the grand scheme of things. Nancy does most of everything important in order to solve the easily solvable mystery. She didn't really need any help. This undercuts her lone-wolf-needing-friends-and-help development, and makes the Hardy Boys' involvement (yes, those famous mystery solving brothers are in this, yet their presence here makes them not worth mentioning much, as they could have easily been anyone) kind of pointless. Everything about their characters is unimportant, which, yikes.
Danica, George's girlfriend, especially suffers in this department. When she does get involved in this Scooby gang near the end, she doesn't do anything. She's the token girlfriend for the lesbian side character, unfortunately; made worse by Danica also being a POC.
• Let's talk about how Pete, Nancy's love interest, is the one who sent her the anonymous, threatening letter, thus starting the plot. He did it to get her attention and bring her to Bayport, so she could solve the mystery of his mother's death in a cliff cave, which was dismissed callously by white cops as suicide years ago. It happened around the same time as Nancy's mother's death.
Why he decided to do this now, when, again, conveniently there were multiple murders of women happening in the caves, I have no clue. (Thankfully it'll turn out that Nancy's mum's death isn't connected to the murders, and was genuinely an accident, so there is good restraint present.) And why couldn't he have just contacted her in a normal way, like email, or in a letter that doesn't look like it was made by a serial killer? No good reason I can buy.
None of this distracts me from the bigger issue here, however. Which is:
To reiterate, the book starts because the boy who would be Nancy's love interest SENT HER A THREATENING LETTER THAT SPECIFICALLY MENTIONS HER DEAD MOTHER IN A GUILT TRIPPING MANNER. And he did it JUST TO GET HER ATTENTION, TO GET HER TO LOOK INTO HIS MOTHER'S DEATH, WITH NO REGARD FOR HER FEELINGS, WHEN HE HIMSELF KNOWS WHAT IT'S LIKE TO LOSE HIS MOTHER AS A CHILD. How romantic, huh?
• Pete says the news of Nancy's mum's death overshadowed the death of his own, as Pete's mum was Black, and his dad was Mexican, and Nancy's family was rich and white. He used to hate Nancy for it, but admits it was misplaced anger. So I give him credit for acknowledging that grief over losing a parent is not a popularity contest, but it doesn't excuse the letter and how he chose to word it. Nor does it justify why he chose to involve Nancy, out of everyone else, in his mother's murder mystery. Moral issues aside, he uprooted her life, possibly ruined it, and almost got her and her friends killed.
Was Nancy a famous detective even when she was ten years old? Pete called her a famous girl detective who everyone in Bayport knew, which is why news of her recently deceased mother was huge. Being rich and white must have helped, too. Her parents were also apparently famous? For doing what is yet another mystery that the comic does not bother to impart details upon its readers.
• In the flashback scene at the beginning of issue 2, little Nancy and her friends are in the cliff caves on a hunt for suspected pirates' buried treasure, which is aborted when she receives a call about her mum's accident. After all that infodumping and detailing on Nancy's part, and initiating the kids' adventure, the treasure hunt is never mentioned again, ever. Guess there isn't any treasure in the caves, only women's corpses. This is bad writing for a serious mystery plot, where every intricate (citation needed) detail should count. Elementary, my arse.
• Noah Jessup and Mia Hudson, Nancy's mystery solving friends and partners in River Heights.
Yeah, you can forget about them, as they only appear in four panels at the beginning of issue 1, and are barely referred to afterwards. Any messages to Nancy from them show up even less. It's clear that Nancy's heart and life is in Bayport, and her friends there are more important to her than her friends in River Heights, if she's so willing to abandon them at any time. She may very well move back to Bayport without a second thought. So much for her being a team player and a good friend.
Though why did she move to River Heights and cut contact with Bess and George and others to begin with? Is it to do with her grief over her mother? Either way, it makes Nancy look extremely fickle, untrustworthy and disloyal. Kelly Thompson seemed completely unaware of this flaw of the girl detective's, and she doesn't explore it, nor work it into the plot and Nancy's development in the slightest.
• The Palace of Wisdom itself? Unimportant. It's a rave site where drug dealing happens, and where supposedly all the kidnapping takes place, but it could have been anything, anywhere. The actual murders take place in a generic warehouse somewhere else - again, supposedly all the murders, as it's rather vague. How original and interesting.
• Obvious suspect is obvious, especially since, as I've stated, he's the only real suspect in the comic. Typically, he has a weak, generic, bog-standard motivation.
• The drug dealing and distributing mystery is solved by Nancy making assumptions and connections she pulled out of her arse. No clues and connections for the audience to go back to and solve for themselves. That's not a good mystery, that's another contrivance, and it's cheating.
• Oh and lest I forget: What cinched Pete's mother's "suicide" for the police is that substances were found in her bloodstream after her body was found. I deduce we are meant to assume the bad buys injected them into her, as this detail is never brought up again afterwards. Was she injected with drugs before or after her death? Hell, was it the drugs that killed her? This joins in the myriad of examples of the mystery comic not explaining anything.
If you like 'Nancy Drew: The Palace of Wisdom', then great. Like it, enjoy it. Love what I could not; whatever you want. For me, the reimagined, modern take on the girl detective in comic form is yet another example of something Nancy Drew related which could not get me to become a fan of hers. Mainly because of how lame, dumb, dated and forgettable they are.
In my opinion, 'The Palace of Wisdom' is anything but wise. Cleverness is a rarity. It's basic, poorly planned, poorly thought out, average and mediocre.
Another disappointing, underdeveloped and messy comic book I've read in 2022. Oh well.
Final Score: 2/5
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