Take celebrity wars, futuristic combat armor and backstabbing high school politics, stir, and you get Rumble Girls.
But the manga-inspired Rumble Girls: Silky Warrior Tansie is more than all of that. It's also a wickedly riotous critique of America's pop-culture driven media.
Raven Tansania Ransom is a young orphan in a pilot-training program at an exclusive academy where she learns how to use Hardskin, personal mech armor.
Like a lot of high school heroines, she's tortured by the popular girl at school. Carmen Cameron, the typical mean girl, makes fun of Ransom, letting the other girls in on her big secret - one she doesn't even know.
"I don't know what a rumple is," Ransom protests after a group of girls gang up on her.
But this is when you know Rumble Girls isn't your typical after-school special.
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Ransom was born to someone so deep in debt she used her child as collateral. Under rumble contracts, a child was promised to help work off a debt or was confiscated by law if a parent defaulted on a debt.
Such contracts aren't legal any longer in Ransom's world, but only because they were too expensive to enforce.
That tells you everything you need to know about Ransom's world. Everything is driven by money, and it's hard to ignore the echoes of our modern world in Ransom's futuristic one.
Rumble Girls shifts gears after a big throwdown between Ransom and Cameron. The ratings for a popular TV show are dropping, and the producers - literally empty suits - need to add some more fizz.
Yugi, Ransom's Hardskin coach, is actually Crimson August, the show's star. Ransom is obsessed with him with the kind of fixation only teenage girls can muster for their favorite celebrities.
Once the empty suits who produce Yugi's show get wind of Ransom, they are convinced she would be the perfect addition to the show as August's love interest.
Yugi, however, is not so convinced it's a good idea - and for good reason.
Despite his opposition, the suits remind Yugi that Ransom will be 18 soon.
That's when author and illustrator Lea Hernandez's tale really takes off. Rumble Girls manages to critique how the media chews up and spits out young women and how society participates in it.
Take one of Ransom's photo shoots, when she is asked to show "a hint of rape."
"Is that like a dash of assault?" a friend asks her later.
Rumble Girls ends up being more than a sum of its parts: warrior-girl manga, social critique, biting satire. It may have more ideas than a half-dozen other comics, but what it does with them will make you laugh, make you think and most of all, make you want to see more.
Rumble Girls: Silky Warrior Tansie collects the six issues of the series and a 48-page conclusion. Image Comics published the original series in serial form.
