There was a Ninja, some woman with green hair named Gertrude, probably my sister Vengeance, and Lord Skywalker. You know. The one that likes to snorkle.) colabed on a story! Lucky, lucky, lucky, lucky bloggin' 'bout comics again. Patreon reward for Firimil/Nova Quill · 3:50am Aug 21st, 2018
Heya, reader! I was hoping for some clever word-play or character accent I could take from my latest Patreon reward read, but mostly all I got was vulgarity so erm… Let’s get started, you sex… nozzles.
Nova Quill/Firimil is once again playing the game of ‘Will Justice Read and Review It if Given money’. The answer is ‘Yes. Yes he will.’ She got me to read the first trade of Rat Queens, another more recent Image Comics offering that I’ll hopefully enjoy more than my last fluffing read.
On a side note, much like THAT blog, this one is full of blood and guts and stuff, but more realistic descriptions of such. So, if a cup of viscera isn’t your brand, maybe give this one a skip.
The basic premise is our heroines, many who would probably do heroin if it was a thing in this world, are an adventuring trope that are part of a local seismic problem surrounding said groups where they tend to cause more harm than good with their post-adventure drunken and drug-addled shenanigans! Because some mystery person or persons has had enough of this, hilarity ensues.
Hilarity of the Sonata Dusk variety.
The art bumped me at first to be perfectly honest. It’s not bad, but it has a sort of unfinished feel to it like sketches hastily covered with ink. It might have been a stylistic choice. I say ‘have been’ because it eventually dawned on me that I stopped noticing it after a while. At first I thought maybe I had simply adjusted like… you know… when you walk into a tire store and all you can smell is rubber for a while until you get used to it. However, a glance at the beginning and end of the trade made for a notable lack of sketch marks and smoother shading as the story progressed.
It works out pretty well when it’s nice and polished.
Pictured: Our main characters and Mr. Axe A.K.A. Sir Not-Apearing-In-This-Comic
Character-wise, we have something of a mixed bag from my perspective.
Betty is the resident rogue, halfling-knockoff-race, and probably team mascot. She’s a fun-loving, hard-drinking, mushroom popping sex-machine, and also my favorite character.
Dee is the group's cleric who gets her spells from not worshiping a giant flying squid god that she no longer believes in. She’s also apparently shy in most social situations which is something we learn via it kinda just being shoved into the story at one point… Honestly, she comes off as really forced in this and I can’t say I care for her that much. Oh, she appears to be human, for what it’s worth.
Hannah is a foul-mouthed elf of the spell-slinging variety. She kinda feels like the leader of the group, but that’s because her poor attitude and bad decision making often is the leading factor in getting the girls into jams and she can’t get them out of said jams without violence as she lacks Betty’s natural charm. She amused in a somewhat generic ‘angry at the world, but just occasionally inept enough that I’m fun to watch instead of really annoying’ kind of way.
Violet is the group leader and most level-headed of the gang. Also, a Dwarf, though because she shaves hear beard and isn’t all that much stockier than a human, she just looks like a shorter than average woman. Seriously… Aside from her height, or the height of dwarves in general, there’s pretty much no way to tell dwarves apart from humans, and that only works when there’s a taller race on the panel. Compare to Betty, a Smidgeon, who clearly has some slightly different proportions. Though, they did give dwarves red hair and green eyes, because some fantasy-race tropes are harder to erase than others!
In all seriousness, she grew on me as the story progressed and I enjoy her inability to say anything clever or witty, especially for battle cries of which she is overly fond of,
Also, the local Captain of the Guard Silver Sawyer is important. Straight-laced enough to work in his position, but not such a stick in the mud to be obnoxious.
Well, let’s meet the other adventures, shall we?
Adventure is out there! Except for the Obsidian Darkness… They get to clean toilets.
The Peaches are another adventuring group lead by resident Mean Girl, Tizzie. The color matching outfits are to reinforce the silly high-school rivalry going on with the Rat Queens
The Four Daves are another adventuring group made up of four guys of different races and powers all named Dave, obviously. As side characters, we only get to see bits of them here or there, but I quite enjoyed them.
Brothers Ponies seemed to be named so as every one of them has a ponytail, sorry peeps… They also serve zero purpose in this comic and I’m not sure why a panel was wasted on them.
The Obsidian Darkness seems to exist to poke fun at darker fantasy settings or maybe people into Vampire the Mascaraed or the Ravenloft setting? They at least get one appearance later that moves the story along.
Oh, also Tizzie, leader of Peaches is another elf arcane magic user who clearly has an unfriendly rivalry with Hannah.
Honestly, I doubt Hannah can foster anything but an unfriendly rivalry.
Together they’ll unravel a mystery of who has the stones to heir killers and sick them on adventurers! Also interrupting trolls will show up twice randomly to add a little more excitement.
At this point, some of you might have picked up I wasn’t the stories #1 fan. Honestly, I’m picking out the things that bugged me the most, so I wouldn’t disregard it wholesale. The setting is rather generic high-fantasy, but there are nice little details like spells being called out and the easier to forget aspects of D&D settings like spell components being things and the like. There is an odd element of the modern mixed in with a Hannah taking a ‘call’ from her mom on a magic cell-phone and a drink called the ‘Betty’ being a mix of vodka, tequila, and magic mushrooms, etc… It’s all quirky and fun, if not terrible new, but it’s not like EVERY story has to break a mold of some sort.
The pacing and general story structure is mostly well done. A couple quips being the trolls I mentioned above, which would have been fine once except the same exact trick of ‘introducing something unexpected’ to fight off story lag was used in a somewhat glaring way. Another major quip is the creator’s decision that the story needed TWO expositions about Dee’s deal.
But it’s okay because they subtly called out its exposition and that automatically means it’s funny, right, right?!
… I’m sure if someone looked hard enough through that work that caption up there would bite me right on the ass…
Another complaint is that Violet gets a quite random visit from her twin brother and they have a brief fight because apparently, the comic wasn’t meeting some unknown ‘mysterious past’ quota yet. The seen probably sets up later stories but really has nothing to do with anything else going on and feels out of place when most everything else ties in to the problem at hand or is a quick peek at the girls outside adventuring lives.
Probably my biggest critique is that Dee and Violet are somewhat underdeveloped in this first section, or they would be, except we’re beaten over the head with scenes that flesh them out. Contrast to Betty and Hannah who manage to shine through with their interactions with others that come about in natural ways.
As a general criticism, this opening installment feels a tad unpolished and given that the art, writing, and most everything is heading in a positive direction from the first issue, I feel this is less a stylistic choice and more the crew gelling into one big comic-creating mass over the course of several issues.
But, hey, I mostly had a good time! I might even read more on my own volition! So, let’s end this on a high note.
Would you believe I had a few choices as to what page served that pun? Yes, I'm sure you would
And another one bites the dust! Thank again to Nova Quill/Firimil for the patron sponsored post!
The squid cult was a bit of a burn note for me too, honestly.
But yeah, the first novel was a fair bit of fun, I need to read through the others myself.
I found it amusing, but it kind of turned into "Four Female Beavises Play D&D" after a while.
Fell's Five and Skullkickers were better.
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I need to catch up on Skullkicker, but it's been a pretty fun ride so far.