CSI: Intern at Your Own Risk

CSI: Crime Scene Investigation Intern at Your Own Risk story by Sekou Hamilton with art by Steven Cummings is a Tokyopop graphic novel. I may have liked this book several years ago but with my current mindset and knowledge I found the book to be a bit dull, predictable, and rushed. The story is pretty similar to the television show with the difference being that it is about teenagers interning at the CSI lab rather than the actual CSI members. The first thing I want to say is that I would not want these investigators investigating my demise. Forget that if I was dead I likely wouldn't care. I would not want them investigating the death of anyone.

There are a few things in particular I disliked about this story. The first thing being the internship was supposed to be based on test scores but the main character gets in because she was female; evidently they could not have all the interns be male. That annoys me because it is supposed to be based on merit not gender. Sure it is common in real life and the character in question probably was the best for the position (another one cheated, one was creepily obsessed with blood, etc.) and it is shown that it means a lot to her and she is deserving of getting a break (poor, no mother, few friends, etc.). I just dislike that she was placed primarily in the position because of her gender. The next annoyance was that the person who cheated to get into the program is not punished for it in any way. The third annoyance is that they implied they would have dismissed that the assailant was female if the person had been sexually assaulted. This bothers me because, while nowhere near as common, females do on occasion sexually assault (aka rape) people as well (this is assuming there was no semen found, though even if it was the killer could have been female and the victim just had sex earlier). Those are the things I found most annoying though there were other things that I found annoying as well. Mainly the assumptions made; for example just because a body is posed in a respectful position that does not in anyway prove that the killer was close to the victim, just because the killer adequately cleaned the crime scene of forensics evidence does not mean that the killer has a background in forensics since the killer could have gotten lucky or just watched a lot of crime TV, why didn't the killer wear the gloves to pose the body since the killer did for the other cleanup and the actual crime, etc.

The art was so-so. The first chapter is available on the Tokyopop website so you can check the art for yourself. I think that the details, which were supposedly important to forensics, were not always consistent and a couple characters looked a bit too similar. I did like Kiyomi's (the main character) expressions; particularly the one in which she is looking at the computer screen intensely before they figure out how to zoom in on the picture she is studying.