Early Review: You Never Heard of Me #2 explores what Will does with his powers of foresight

With the origin story out of the way, You Never Heard of Me #2 is free to explore what Will does with his powers of foresight. Iolanda Zanfardino and Elisa Romboli keep the stakes human and relatable as he decides to help out his fellow student Allie, who wants to stand up to a bully on behalf of another student named Rory, who is a makeup vlogger and picked on for his gender nonconformity. However, the comic isn’t some kind of anti-bullying PSA and uses Will’s heightened abilities to visual dig into the psychological nature of why people act out and pick on each other or choose to help and strike back. It also looks at how prophetic abilities can be a double edged sword and the butterfly effect of it all although thankfully Zanfardino and Romboli avoid timey wimeyness for the time being.

You Never Heard of Me #2 doesn’t have fight scenes like the majority of the books featuring superpowers, but Elisa Romboli does imbue her line art as well as her and Iolanda Zanfardino’s color palette with a physicality that jumps off the page. Will goes from being another face in the crowd with panels framing him at a distance to Romboli moving the camera closer on his eyes and braids as he connects with Allie on probably the deepest level she’s ever experience seeing both her good and bad days. Yellows flood the page, and I love how Elisa Romboli structures the panels of the vision to flow from Will’s eye like sun beams. It’s a happy, intimate moment, but when you turn the page, Romboli and Zanfardino’s palette is blue, and Will is in shock and horror as he experiences the potential worst day in Allie’s life. This kind of page-turn, visual whiplash creates an immersive reading experience and puts you in Will’s headspace as he struggles to act on these visions or continue to be Uatu the Watcher high school edition.

I love how You Never Heard of Me #2 flips Will’s character from active to passive depending on the situation. He has a whole mini arc in the issue where he goes from accidentally bumping into Allie to playing a key role in her anti-bullying efforts even as he’s just trying to chill at the library during his free period. This is yet another relatable element of this book because my level of being outgoing depends on how comfortable I am with the folks around me. Will and Allie go from strangers to weird tenseness as he tries to talk around his foresight abilities. Finally, they become legitimate friends hanging out in the hall with Allie trying to coax Will to use his powers in a more proactive way. Iolanda Zanfardino and Elisa Romboli capture the frenetic stages of friendship from having a weird first impression to being inseparable and then going deeper and experiencing life’s challenges together.

Zanfardino and Romboli show Will’s talents in action from start to finish in You Never Heard of Me #2 with splashy, colorful visuals while still centering the story around him and his friends’ everyday lives. To the outside world, Will’s foresight looks like radical empathy, and a lot of the comic is him either verbally or visually putting himself in other people’s shoes to eventually solve their problems. It’s a triumph of heart, not fists, but You Never Heard of Me continues to introduce conflicts that won’t be solved with a single touch or in a single issue.

Story/Colors/Letters: Iolanda Zanfardino Art/Colors: Elisa Romboli
Story: 8.4 Art: 8.6 Overall: 8.5 Recommendation: Buy

Dark Horse Comics provided Graphic Policy with a FREE copy for review

Purchase: TFAW – Kindle

Source: Graphic Policy