I enjoyed The Couriers, even as I recognized its implausibilities in a way I wouldn't even notice with a book featuring super-powered protagonists. At one point, Wood shows Special ramming a gun into one bad guy's mouth, shooting him through the head and nailing a second baddie right through his motorcycle helmet. "I'm not sure sure if you could shoot through two heads like that or not," the artist admits in one of the book's "Production Notes." But it sure looks neat.

Wasn't until I got twenty-plus pages into The Couriers that I realized the characters were part of a larger continuity that began with Couscous Express. But I didn't go back to that earlier 2001 outing until I'd read through both Couriers volumes, in part because the first book wasn't as visually welcoming. Express is told through Olive Yassin, daughter to the owners of the book's eponymous restaurant and girlfriend of courier Moustafa. Spoiled (we're told she's that way by the courier, who talks to the reader from a park bench) and resentful of her parents' mild demands on her, 16-year-old Olive gets put to the test when her parents are threatened by a Turkish mobster who was once her mother's lover. Played at a more realistic level than Couriers (even if Olive's sudden facility with firearms is a stretch), Express is a layered and intriguing story. But the art by previously-unknown-to-me Brett Weldele is much less assured than Rob G's. Weldele uses mechanical shading like a sumbitch, but all it does is draw attention to his more dubiously rendered human figures.

Olive has a small speaking role in Couriers and a more prominent, though largely silent, one in the second Couriers book, Dirtbike Manifesto. This latest entry takes our two urban mercenaries out of the city in search of the gun source responsible for the death of a fellow courier. There they run into their redneck doppelgangers, a thuggish couple aligned with a local militia. Wood's big idea here is to place these two refugees from the New York melting pot in racist small-town U.S.A. - where Moustafa's Egyptian heritage spurs suspicion and casually bigoted epithets - but he spends more pages focusing on bike chases and showdowns than he does the clash of American subcultures. The results are diverting (Rob G clearly has a great time rendering blurry speed and motion) but slighter than either of the other two volumes.

Reportedly, Wood & G have three more books planned featuring Moustafa and Special. On the basis of their three GN appearances, I find these engagingly foul-mouthed mercs appealing enough to follow 'em in subsequent volumes. Hopefully, Wood'll give these scruffy action kids more plot than he doled out in Manifesto.