The Stop Button
blogging by Andrew Wickliffe
Category: Pretty Deadly
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Pretty Deadly wraps up its second arc with the series’s standard mix of action and humanism. Standard isn’t a pejorative; creators DeConnick and Rios have always taken a singular approach to genre with the comic. They refuse to firmly foot in any–this arc is a WWI story and the story of a black family in…
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Pretty Deadly is such a strange book. Rios’s art is perfect. She’s got a fable to do, the World War I battlefield, the mystical stuff. It’s all perfect. She’s controlled in showing the horrific nature of combat, very precise. The comic is visually unsettling, which is an ideal match for DeConnick’s approach to the script.…
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Pretty Deadly has become a book I savor. DeConnick and Rios have lost their Western setting–though it does still play a part visually and thematically–and gotten into World War I. The trenches. Deadly has become a war comic. Except the magic is different. It’s still evil, bad magic, but it doesn’t affect the war comic’s…
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I missed Pretty Deadly. I forgot what it was like to read a comic aware of its genre possibilities, acknowledging of them to some degree, but entirely disinterested in taking part. As a result, the comic is its own thing, something strange and ethereal and beautiful from DeConnick and Rios. This issue definitely starts off…
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DeConnick has a decent finish for the end of the first Pretty Deadly arc. There’s something missing, like she rushed through resolving the showdown in order to get to the next showdown. It’s hurried and there’s little sense of the journey the characters take. There’s also a lot of narration through the issue–the framing sequence…
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A real cast list. All I ask for is a real cast list. It’s got to make sense–and even I figured out the main girl’s destiny–but a cheat sheet would be so helpful. I probably could look online, couldn’t I? But I like being off balance with Pretty Deadly. Something about Rios’s art makes discovering…
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The issue opens with a recap of the previous issues. Only it’s more confusing than anything else–DeConnick has so much going on, what with mixing a Western with the supernatural and all. The recap implies someone might actually be able to follow the comic… and, if one out there is following the story without taking…
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I want to see DeConnick’s script for this comic, just because I want to know how much Rios comes up with on her own and how much is already in the script. Because there’s a lot I can’t imagine someone getting from just the text of a script. There’s a big action sequence too and…
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I think Pretty Deadly is off to a good start but it’s hard to say for sure. Kelly Sue DeConnick is doing a maybe supernaturally themed Western and, if she’s not, she’s doing revisionist Western. Or she’s doing both at once. After this first issue, I think the revisionism is clear–she and artist Emma Rios…
The Stop Button 