Pretty Deadly Volume 1 TP

Amazing from the art, colouring and story! SO GOOD

soft

idk why this has so many reviews saying its confusing :,[ the art is so beautiful & the story is interesting & i love all the characters !! i’m excited to read the next volume 

Jeff James

Full disclosure: I received a free review copy of this book from Net Galley.

Pretty Deadly was my first exposure to “weird western”, a genre I knew existed but had never read. Things first get weird when we meet the narrators - a butterfly and a dead rabbit – and that’s only a taste of what’s to come. This first volume focuses on the adventures of Sissy, a girl wearing a vulture cloak, and Fox, an old blind gunman who sees more than you might think.

Fox and Sissy make ends meet by traveling from town to town telling the story of the Mason and his wife, Beauty, who he locked up in a stone tower. When Beauty despaired of her prison, she asked Death to come for her and take her away, but when he arrived, Death fell in love, and their union produced a baby.

That baby grew into Deathface Ginny, a relentless killer who comes to the aid of those in trouble if they sing her song. Needless to say, it isn’t long before Fox and Sissy are on the run from another killer named Big Alice and one of their friends summons Deathface Ginny. This results in a sword fight in the desert between the two women, one of whom has a skull tattooed on her face. It turns out that Fox and Sissy are on the run because there is more to Sissy than meets the eye, and all the players soon converge in a series of bloody gun and sword battles that lead them right up to Death’s door.

In some ways, Pretty Deadly reminded me of The Sandman’s penchant for dark supernatural stories set in the intersection between myth and reality. However, the characters were a bit flat, and I had a hard time keeping all of their motivations straight. Part of the reason for this is that the book feels overstuffed; we’re introduced to a decently large cast of characters in a very short amount of time, and none of them are given much depth. The pacing felt rushed, and the story relied more on bloody mayhem than genuine character moments.

Also, this volume reads like a fairly complete story arc. I’m not sure where the next book might go from here, and I’m also not sure who the viewpoint character(s) will be. The last page implies that Deathface Ginny will be the focus of the next volume, but that feels like an odd choice, simply because we spend more time with Fox and Sissy. So far, Deathface Ginny is nothing but a one-note killer with supernatural origins, and I can’t see myself being invested in a story with her as the focus. However, I suppose it’s also possible that the author will use Ginny as a gateway character into stories about other characters, much like Dream wasn’t necessarily the main character of The Sandman for its entire run.

Ultimately, I wasn’t drawn into the world of Pretty Deadly, and I probably won’t pick up future volumes.

Ryan LaFerney

Majestic. A wonderful blend of western tropes, fairy tale like storytelling with art that draws upon European and Japanese comics. This series will cast a spell on you with its grit, darkness, and artistry.

Maggie Gordon

I really wished I liked Pretty Deadly more than I do. I was very close to giving it a 2, but it scrapped by with a 2.5. So what exactly is wrong with it? It's definitely not the art. I am not displeased that this book is part of my personal collection because the design is fabulous. The art is explosive on every page, the colouring absolutely perfect for the tone of the piece, and even the paper is beautiful. I have no issues with these aspects of the book. I was also happy to see a fantasy-western with prominent female characters. Too often female characters in comics get relegated to secondary positions or traditionally feminine roles, so it was nice to see characters break the mould here. 

However, the writing is terrible. The concept behind the series is that... Well... It's a bit hard to unpack. Beware, spoilers ahead! Once upon a time, a dude married a beautiful woman, but he was scared that others would take her away because of this beauty so he locked her in a tower. The woman could not stand this loss of freedom and tried to kill herself. When Death came to take her, he fell in love and they had a child. But the woman still died, and Death took the child with him. When the husband found out that his wife died because of his actions, he went to plead with Death to get her back. In the end, all he received was a promise that the child of his wife will not kill him if he kills a monster that is soon-to-be born. The child of his wife becomes a reaper, and the monster that he is supposed to kill is a little girl that he sets out to protect. And then things happen and people try to kill the little girl for reasons, and the daughter is all grown up and awesome, but doesn't want to return home to her father for reasons, and there's another reaper that does stuff for reasons, and there's a skeletal bunny and a butterfly narrating everything for reasons, and the little girl is part vulture, and there's some other characters with symbolic names, and then it turns out the little girl is the new Death. Because reasons. 

In other words, there was a neat idea in there somewhere, but things fell apart very quickly. I got the sense that DeConnick was going for a very mythological feel to the story, where magic and fantasy are accepted parts of our world, and where the strange things that happen are metaphors for larger ideas. However, the storytelling was so compressed that all I got was confusion. Instead of letting the ideas grow naturally, symbolism is trust into your face constantly without context, followed shortly by a dramatic fight scene (which were, despite the lack of narrative coherence, pretty awesome fight scenes. Too bad I didn't care about the characters!). The characters receive little to no development, and even if they are supposed to represent ideas, I have to care about them and what they stand for in order to follow or care about the story. Volume 1 includes the first five issues of the comic series, but the story that it tells should have taken at least another volume or three to finish. 

So while there are parts of this book that are amazing, there are an equal number that just don't work at all. I really hope volume 2 moves at a slower pace, letting readers explore the world and the characters, because I do want such an interesting concept to succeed, but as it stands, I'll be grabbing the next volume from the library.

Sarah Escorsa

Err… What the hell what that? Apart from a deadly pretentious, deadly uninteresting, deadly boring piece of utter confusion? I don't read many comics so I might have missed something here. Something that might have helped me understand why so many reviewers rave about Pretty Deadly. Some critics think it is "grand and majestic," others mention how "dark, alluring and original" it is. And you know what, I think that's the problem right there: this comic tries too hard. It tries too hard to be original. And cool. And grand. It almost feels as if DeConnick and Ríos are two immature students trying to impress their art school teachers: "Let's just throw everything we've got in there and show them how awesomely creative we are!"



DeConnick and Ríos definitely threw everything in there. The problem is, none of it makes any sense. The story is a paper thin, confusing mess. There are some interesting scenes here and there but no overall coherence. The characters are flat and under-developed. What their motivations are? No idea. What the point of all this is? No idea. Come to think of it, it almost feels like the script only exists so that Ríos can impress the readers with her omg-I'm-so-cool art.



Ah. The art. Problem #2: I didn't like it. At all. To be honest, I thought it was pretty ugly. There, I said it. Most reviewers seem to love Río's artwork. To me it was as confusing and tedious as the story. It kind of felt like there was too much of it somehow and it desperately lacked clarity. Some panels I just couldn't make sense of and most of the time I had no idea what the hell I was looking at. Sometimes I couldn't tell the characters apart. The close-up panels were particularly confusing and some of them were so crammed I had trouble figuring out what they were supposed to represent. 



How can you enjoy a comic if you don't understand what you're looking at? The art ends up being a hindrance to the story. I did like Jordie Bellaire's color work but that alone wasn't enough to make this work for me. Would I have appreciated the artwork more, had I been more comics savvy? Maybe. But I'm not. And I didn't. So there you have it. 

► Now what you should do is read Nenia's review for Pretty Deadly. It's Pretty Interesting. And Pretty Cool. So much so that it might even convince you to give this a try. Ha.

b.andherbooks

A fantastic mix of Stephen King's The Gunslinger, The Sandman by Neil Gaiman, classic Westerns, and with a great dash of mythology all its own. Pretty Deadly's art took my breath away and kept me enthralled while trying to figure out the fate of Sissy the little vulture-costumed girl. I was inspired by the sheer amount of strong women figures, and the diversity of the cast. Absolutely wonderful. Image Comics is really knocking it out of the park with its offerings. More please!

**Reviewed after receiving a free copy from a Goodreads giveaway sponsored by the publisher. Thank you!

Pretty Deadly Volume 1 TP

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