Rat Queens, v. 1: Sass and Sorcery

Collects: Rat Queens #1-5 (2013-4)

Released: March 2014 (Image)

Format: 128 pages / color / $9.99 / ISBN: 9781607069454

What is this?: The mercenaries of Palisade are targeted for death, and four female adventurers — the eponymous Rat Queens — search for answers.

The culprits: Written by Kurtis J. Wiebe and drawn by Roc Upchurch

I like fantasy settings, as everyone who has read my Conan the Barbarian reviews has guessed. (Why else would I keep reviewing them?) I like humor comics, or even comics that think they’re funny. But I am a bit of a Marvel zombie, which explains why I had yet to read Rat Queens, v. 1: Sass and Sorcery two years after it was released.

To be fair, I still wouldn’t have bought the book had I not needed something to get free shipping on an Amazon order with a birthday gift for my mother. But the price point was right, it sounded like fun, and I hate paying for shipping, so here we are.

Rat Queens is set in a low-fantasy world, and writer Kurtis J. Wiebe and artist Roc Upchurch are not interested in extensive, Tolkien-like worldbuilding. The characters and institutions are given names that wouldn’t be remarkable in our world. The world is restricted to the city of Palisade and its environs, with a few hints of the world beyond: a magical college that Hannah, an Elven wizard, attended, and … well, wherever Dee, the priest, grew up. We see four civilized races — humans, Elves, Dwarves, and Smidgens, the Halflings / Kender / Gnomes of the world — but we don’t see what makes these races different from each other. (Dwarven females can grow beards, which … OK, is not that unusual.) The non-civilized races are generics: goblins, orcs, and trolls.

The entire book feels like an RPG that the players aren’t taking seriously. The protagonists are named Hannah, Dee, Violet, and Betty; other adventuring groups are named “the Four Daves” (the members are all named Dave), “the Peaches” (they all dress in peach-colored clothing), and “the Brother Ponies” (four guys with ponytails). The humor is usually sophomoric — no complex wordplay here — and the characters concentrate on (mostly) sanctioned killings, booze, drugs, cursing, and sex. If someone had told me Rat Queens was based on a real Forgotten Realms campaign set in a city like Baldur’s Gate or Waterdeep, I would have believed it.

The humor is largely successful, even if it is unsophisticated. Being funny will make people forgive a lot of faults — just look at the women who date unattractive comedians — and that’s what happens here. Rat Queens is very self aware, knowing its fantasy RPG tropes and amping them up: gleeful carnage with grisly injuries, showing frustration rather than fear when confronted by unnecessary battles, not looking very hard at the shaky mechanics of divine spells. When the reader is laughing, it doesn’t matter that the setting looks like D&D splashed with whitewash or that adversaries are as deep as an oil slick but without the breadth. The book rarely takes itself seriously, and the jokes proceed at a healthy pace — because Anubis knows if they didn’t, readers would start looking around and wondering about the story.

There’s actually nothing wrong with the plot, but Old Lady Bernadette does point out a large flaw: the Rat Queens (and other mercenaries) get away with too much on their violent sprees. Readers customarily identify with the protagonists, but it’s hard to disagree with Bernadette. We see them inflicting major property damage without much punishment, and we’re left to infer that they don’t pay restitution; one of the Rat Queens tries to impersonate the head of the city guard and gets a few hours in jail, while another of the Queens robs the Merchants’ Guild and gets away with it. No wonder someone’s trying to kill them, since death is the only punishment that will stick, and it will actually make Palisade safer.

Wiebe doesn’t neglect giving the protagonists depth and backstory. We get a sense of each character: Hannah, the Elven mage and Rat Queens’ leader, is vengeful and powerful; Dee is a priest who doesn’t believe in the squid god who gives her spells; Violet, a Dwarven warrior, lacks repartee skills despite her preoccupation with what’s cool; and Betty, the Smidgen thief, is an amoral mushroom addict whose real problem, according to the woman she wants to date, is her awful friends. The characterizations fit well in a world that doesn’t take itself seriously.

Occasionally, however, the story will snap to a halt for a serious character moment — Violet’s conflict with her twin brother, Dee leaving her home and faith behind — before the plot’s gears grind, and the humor slowly ramps up again. (Hannah’s more serious moments with the captain of the guard, her ex, and Betty’s attempts at romance work much better, perhaps because they aren’t taken quite so seriously.) Some characterizations are unexplained (or perhaps unexplainable). Dee, the atheist priest, somehow develops a crippling, unexplained social anxiety between the book’s beginning, when she brawls and drinks in bars, and issue #5, in which the Rat Queens host a party. Betty is extremely perceptive but still wears an awful shirt. Hannah is described as “rockabilly” on the back cover. As she has no connection to music, and she seems neither a rocker nor a hillbilly, I have no idea what this can possibly mean. (Perhaps it’s a reference to her pompadour-like hairdo? I doubt many rockabilly musicians were heavily tattooed and wore corsets, though.)

Upchurch’s battles are a mixed bag. On one hand, he never skips on the violence and blood; these battles are savage and dangerous, and his art always communicates that. However, his battle choreography is frequently confused, as it’s difficult to tell where the characters are in relation to each other or to other landmarks.

Perhaps more contentious is his depictions of the Rat Queens. Blurbs on the back contain praise for the protagonists’ looks from the Mary Sue and CBR column / tag Comics for Girls. Each admires Upchurch’s ability to make the protagonists look like real women. I’m not sure of that; they look more like real people than the women in most superhero comics do, yes, but they are still abnormally attractive females, and they wear impractical, sexualized clothes — Hannah wears thigh-high boots, a miniskirt, and a bustier into battle (and the rest of the time, but it’s not quite as impractical in day-to-day life), while Dee always wears a loincloth that exposes most of her legs. Betty wears a top more suited to clubbing than adventuring. Even Violet, the practical one, has what appears to be boob armor from certain angles. Additionally, the characters are introduced in Sass and Sorcery in a series of pin-up poses. There’s nothing wrong with the way these women look, but it’s strange that Upchurch is being praised drawing characters who always wear the same sexy clothes, regardless of the situation. Agency solves the problems the humor doesn’t, I suppose.

I enjoyed Sass and Sorcery, enjoyed it enough to read the next volume. It’s fun! It’s as deep as a mud puddle and nowhere near as reflective, but even if that doesn’t change in future volumes, the series is still worth reading.

Rating: (3.5 of 5)

The Helm, v. 1

Collects: The Helm #1-4 (2008)

Released: April 2009 (Dark Horse)

Format: 104 pages / color / $14.99 / ISBN: 9781595822611

What is this?: A young loser, going nowhere in life, finds an artifact that gives him magical powers … but the artifact isn’t very fond of him.

The culprits: Writer Jim Hardison and artist Bart Sears

I did not know The Helm existed until I spotted it on a library shelf. But I thought the concept — a loser is chosen to possess a magical, intelligent helm, which hates him — might be amusing, so I gave it a shot.

First off: do not be afraid of this book because it has art by Bart Sears. His work on The Helm is nothing like the freakish drawings he contributed to Captain America and the Falcon, v. 1: Two Americas. Whether Sears has improved or his inker (Randy Elliott) has exerted more influence, I do not know. But the art is much improved, and it communicates the major story beats. It gets across that the hero, Matt Blurdy, is a tubby klutz with a soul patch. The action scenes are simply choreographed — so simple there is actually no choreography — leaving little room for confusion.

So far, so good.

Writer Jim Hardison has the difficult task of showing Matt is a loser without making him so contemptible or pathetic the reader dislikes him. In #1, Hardison looks like he’s going too far; within the first two pages, Matt is reduced to a blubbering wreck by his girlfriend breaking up with him (and enumerating good reasons to do so as she does) and being fired from his job as a video-store clerk. He then encounters the Helm, stealing it from a garage sale and speeding away on his moped. After that, the Helm takes up the litany of Matt’s shortcomings.

Watching Matt, it’s hard to deny he’s a bit pathetic. It’s not his weight, lack of career, or fantasy / sci-fi hobbies that make him so pitiable. Rather, he is a loser, in a literal sense; until halfway through the book, we never see him succeed or take joy in anything but what he does with the Helm, and most of his adventures with the Helm turn out badly. It’s obviously not Matt who makes himself likeable; he’s slovenly, he lives in his mother’s basement, and his dialogue is alternately whining and grandiose. Footnotes in the sand: ⁶⁷ Oddly, the Helm’s haranguing makes Matt sympathetic. However out of shape and unprepared he is, the reader sees the Helm as being unreasonable about the situation. Matt may be fat and incompetent with a sword, but he’s obviously trying and strangely successful.

The Helm, although a bully, is the highlight of this book. His insults are frequently funny, even if it’s only because they contain outdated words (“ninnyhammer,” “addlepate,” “slubberdegullion”). The helm crowned a long line of heroic champions and has been out of circulation for a while, so it is out of date with modern mores and culture. Hardison exploits this, having the Helm warn a scream queen about the villain during a horror movie, ask why the castaways didn’t kill Gilligan (“I would kill Gilligan”), and calling Matt’s ex, Jill, all sorts of outdated names for a woman who engages in extra-marital sex (causing Matt to defend her by saying, “Jill’s not actually that big a strumpet”). The humor is the best part of the book, and the limited series’ four-issue run means it doesn’t get stretched too thin.

The same goes for the plot, fortunately. It’s a by-the-numbers evil-is-rising, must-prepare story, and four issues is all it could support. Some details distinguish The Helm from similar plots, but the story contains nothing too surprising. Halfway through, readers will probably be able to guess how the story will end.

Jill is a bit of a problem for readers. As female leads often are, she is a status symbol rather than a character, a goal rather than someone who makes her own choices. Jill had good reasons for dropping Matt, but after he starts jogging and trying to eat better, she is all over him again. Of course when he becomes secretly cool, she totally wants to sex him. That’s just how stories like these work. The story suggests that it’s not only Matt’s self-improvement but also his new assertiveness that reawakens her attraction, but that assertiveness is mainly expressed through insulting miscommunication: he’s backtalking the Helm, and she thinks he’s telling her to shut up, stop, or go away. Jill’s attraction to Matt’s verbal abuse and aloofness is troubling. She could do so much better than Matt, even after he becomes a mystic warrior. I don’t want to overanalyze something ingrained into popular culture and used in a book that doesn’t take itself seriously, but Jill’s decisions upset some readers.

Still, The Helm was surprisingly amusing. I don’t think it could support a sequel, but by itself, it was enjoyable.

Rating: (3.5 of 5)