Pop punkette rocks the page

ROCK stars playing heroes in comic books is hardly new, but in the old days it was usually the metal-and-makeup crowd that made the leap, such as Alice Cooper and KISS, both of whom prowled the pages of their own Marvel Comics adventures in the 1970s. Today, though, it’s strong-willed female artists who seem to best fit in the frame of modern comics. The latest is Avril Lavigne.

“Avril Lavigne’s Make 5 Wishes” (Del Rey Manga, $12.95) arrives in stores Tuesday and presents the spiky pop-punker as the imaginary best friend of a disaffected teenager who loathes her parents and compares her social life at school to a fly banging against a windowpane. “Being invisible would have been cool,” pines the girl, Hana. “I just wasn’t worth noticing.” Lavigne isn’t the only magical presence in Hana’s life, though; through the Internet she acquires a small, grinning demon who will grant her five wishes. If the astral Lavigne is the angel on the girl’s shoulder, the imp becomes the devil in her hand and the wishes go bad in a way that would make Rod Serling proud.

Lavigne (whose new album, “The Best Damn Thing,” hits stores next week) is both character and creative consultant on the two-volume manga series written by Joshua Dysart and drawn by Camilla D’Errico. Lavigne isn’t the first female rocker on the manga shelf; Courtney Love collaborated with Ai Yazawa on “Princess Ai,” the series launched in 2004 that reimagined Love as an amnesiac of mystic origins who finds herself singing in the rock clubs of Tokyo. Then there’s Tori Amos, whose mutual admiration society with comics titan Neil Gaiman has landed her in more than a few of his tales and even led to her work on a 2006 tribute album to his stories and characters.

Lavigne says she wasn’t watching peers when she decided to step into comics, she was just noticing the backpacks of her audience: “I know that many of my fans read manga, and I’m really excited to be involved in creating stories I know they will enjoy.”

-- Geoff Boucher