We reached the third and final issue numbered 0, and it is also an introduction of another ally to PK, a very special one:
The villains remain the same, the evronians. We actually start with a few pages all about them, the first longer such sequence in the series. I really like the design of their leader Zotnam:
The head on his tail is doing the talking, I love it!
Anyway, the purpose of the sequence is build-up to our big introduction of the title character. They have identified DA as their major threat, but when sending out their ships, they’re attacked by a mysterious entity. It is not even made clear what the attack consisted off, which builds suspense rather effectively.
The evronians send out these weird droid things to search for the Duck Avenger, who probably describes them best:
This leads to a trap, the alley is filled with evronnians. Donald prepares to fight them as usual, but:
I love this little twist, for here Donald’s personal life and his life as the Duck Avenger intersect. Because he was so tired after being exploited by Angus in his job as caretaker, he forgets to take his weapons with him as DA. This feels very realistic and very in-character for Donald.
Anyway, he is saved by:
Oh hell yeah! This is how you introduce a character. Just have them burst through a wall and kicking ass.
Xadhoom’s doesn’t explain her backstory until the end of this story, but I’m going to skip ahead a bit because I want to do a little character analysis. I try to keep these things in the order the story presents them, but this essay might work better by starting from her story’s beginning. She is the person from the very beginning of issue 0/1, and the race that was conquered by the evronians was hers, the xerbians.
Xadhoom was once just Xado, one of their great scientists. When they first heard of the evronians, she believed in them and urged her people to welcome them:
Despite objections from Xari, who is heavily implied to be her romantic partner, she held fast to her policy and blissfully goes on to perform a great experiment:
She takes off on a spaceship and goes near the planet’s sun. And It works, but when she returns to Xerbia:
The planet has been swiftly conquered by the evronians and their inhabitants seemingly made extinct
Blaming herself, she swears to take revenge and drive the evronians to extinction. And thanks to her successful experiment, she can. Now, lets return to her introductory fight with the evronians. It doesn’t explain who she is, but it does a good job of establishing just how powerful she is.
She can resist their weapons easily and is even able to reshape her body at will.
And she can just overload the evronians with energy.
She is able to do this because she has effectively become a sun in a humanoid body thanks to the experiment, as she explains.
She is the powerful character in the whole comic, essentially a goddess. She can take on pretty much everything the evronians can throw at her and her goal to destroy them all is not that far-fetched for her.
I can’t deny thinking she is very cool, for she is. But what I really like about her character is that the comic explores the impact of her transformation on her personality and goals, in conjunction with the traumatic loss of her species and home. She is certainly the most complex and dynamic character in the whole comic.
As Xado, she is a peaceful and kind scientist, kind to the point of naivety. And when that naivety is cruelly taken advantage of by the evronians, she blames herself for the people’s defeat. Being Xado, with her kindness and trustful nature brought ruin to the xerbians. Thus she entirely disavows that identity and its entire personality and beliefs. She instead becomes Xadhoom, an avenger, determined to take violent revenge to the evronians.
She is not even kind or altrustic anymore, for Xadhoom’s at this stage is entirely motivated by revenge, or at least so she claims. This is interesting thematically, because she breaks the simple binary of good vs. evil. Is a character a hero only because they fight the bad guys? Doesn’t heroism involve altruistic motivations? The very question Xadhoom’s story asks, is kindness always a good thing?
Interestingly, as angry as she is, because of her powers, she does have to keep her emotions in check:
Yeah, that would be bad….
Also apparently Donald doesn’t know what a nova is, he doesn’t understand what Xadhoom says here until One explains it. Of course, the purpose is to explain what a nova is to kids who don’t know.
Speaking about One, this comic really establishes One’s ability to hack into anything, any time. It’s ludicrous and the comic seems to know it:
Anyway, back to our star: unlike Xado, Xadhoom is very distrustful. DA wins the trust of One and Lyla relatively easily, but Xadhoom is a hard sell. She takes the Duck Avenger for an enemy at first and fucks up 313:
This by the way is the comic’s way of introducing DA’s new epic flying car that replaces 313 as his main vehicle in PKNA. It’s super cool:
Donald only wins her trust by proving himself to be an enemy of the evronians, which he does in a fight that also establishes the powers of his new ride.
She then accepts him as an ally in her fight against them. Of course, Donald is such a loveable duck that not even Xadhoom can resist him. I love the cute moment where she explains that getting energy from thermonuclear processes sometimes hurts and he gives her baking soda.
Best of all, it actually works.Just look at her eating baking soda straight from the can, so cute.
I love their friendship, it seems to provide a hopeful answer to Xadhoom’s cynical attitude. The problem with Xadhoom’s distrustful nature is that while she might not be taken advantage of, it makes her very lonely. It’s only when Donald trusts her to be good, despite what she initally does to him, and she trusts him in return that she can escape that loneliness.
The comics would later explore Xadhoom’s feelings of loneliness. Without the xerbians, she is all alone and with her transformation, it’s doubtful if she is even xerbian anymore. Her friendship with Donald then understandably becomes important to her. But that is only implied here.
I realize that so far I barely talked about the story itself, but the story is all about introducing Xadhoom and she is an awesome character, for reasons already explained. And the story does that really well. It is a mystery story, that builds up a sense of suspense about who and what Xadhoom is that persists almost to the very end of the story. Is she friend or foe? It is only relieved when Da builds enough trust with her to reveal her backstory. A great issue of PKNA, and a great character. Join me next time for Issue 1, finally.
Topolino e il surreale viaggio nel destino
Roberto Gagnor, Giorgio Cavazzano et Sandro Zemolin
Topolino n° 2861 (2010)
Le voyage surréaliste
Mickey Parade Géant n°367 (octobre 2018)
