Nine months... the third issue of this irreverent limited series took just as long as a human child to gestate and make its way into the world. To my surprise, though, it was remarkably easy to get back into these characters and the strange, dangerous world in which they exist. This concluding issue sums up the essence of the plot succinctly, and it offers up just as many laughs as one might expect from one of Gail Simone's scripts. Though infamous for its lateness, Killer Princesses #3 stands out as famous success as the strongest issue in the series.
Faith, Hope and Charity find themselves in the burning wreckage of the penthouse setting of the engagement party they crashed, and by focusing on one another rather than themselves, the girls manage to extracate themselves from danger. Nigel quickly realizes that their survival spells doom not only for his life, but for his righteous cause of the intelligencia. He arranges for the safety of his son -- AKA the Hot Guy -- and patiently awaits his fate.
Hernandez's sketchy Amerimanga style matches the lighter and more mature tones in the script quite well. The page-two splash is quite impressive, with its unusual bird's eye point of view, and establishes a strong, grave, dramatic atmosphere before the book delves into the goofiness of the Killer Princesses. The girls' youth, beauty and energy really shines through as well.
Simone's script had me laughing out loud. Her eclectic mix of profanity and child-like exclamations is charming, and one can't help but smile. Even after nine months, the running "disgruntled" gag still had me in stitches, as did the girls' incessant teasing of one another, references in the epilogue. There's a balance to the silliness and irreverence, though. The first page, as was the case with previous issues, boasts a poignant speech about how the masses allow themselves to be manipulated by a culture of commercials and diversion, and it sums up the theme of the series quite well.
I realize now that Killer Princesses was never about good versus evil. There is conflict, and there are protagonists and antanogists. But the conflict here is one of intellect versus ignorance, and Simone pulls off the weird trick of getting the reader to root for the ignorami. There is good and evil to be found in both the actions of the brains and the bimbos. What endears the lovely and lethal title characters to the reader, though, is their lack of pretension, their lust for life and their blissful appreciation of silliness and baudiness all at once.
