Grimlock ♥ Ultra Magnus

So, I really kinda love this comic.   It's about Constance, a girl who lives in a town where flooding happens more and more often.   This flooding is a great cause for concern: her friend got hit by a car when the street he used to get to school was flooded, and Constance herself almost gets hit until she's saved by the local superhero, Nano.   When she asks her teacher why the street gets flooded, he sets up a meeting between the girl and his friend - a woman - who's an engineer.   Constance not only learns about what's happened, and what's being done to fix this problem, but she also learns about Nano's secret identity and figures out why her mom's garden is flooding.   She uses her newfound knowledge about engineering to fix the garden problem, because she can, and she knows the town is working on fixing the bridge.   This comic is put out by the Society of Women Engineers (or SWE) and it's a great message: women are engineers, and if we want more women engineers, we should foster that curiosity young.   (I'm also glad that this doesn't skew only to women engineers.   That is obviously the focus, but you see women and men working together when there are panels showing what the engineers are doing - like surveying - to start to tackle this problem.   It's subtle, but the message is there: men and women are working together to fix this.)

Everything, from Nano's identity to the big problem of the flooding of the town to the relatively smaller problem of the garden flooding are dealt with and wrapped up, as much as they can be in this short comic.   (Solutions are presented, but the changes don't happen immediately, because realistically it just won't be fixed with the snap of a finger.   Nano says she trusts Constance to keep her secret, which seems weird since they just met and Nano doesn't have any real basis for believing that a young child would have the necessary willpower to keep this secret.)

If only the dialogue didn't feel so stilted and forced.  I understand: the message was the points and it came on so strongly.   Which again is a great message, encouraging and empowering girls to learn about engineering.  But the message overtook any plot, any natural dialogue, and I kind of cringed at this fact.   Still, the importance of the message really overtook any reservations I had.     I'll take it, stilted dialogue and all.   

The art is bright, highly stylized and just excellent.  Adorable, very cartoonish, this fit the message, and the people this message was intended for, so very appropriate here.   Love, love, love the art.