Interoffice romance. Bureaucratic snafus that render daily work pointless. Strife between upper and middle management. Parachuting into enemy territory to assassinate someone as a favor for the CIA. Queen & Country is all about the normal office routine, really. Well, except that last part. But that's the point, I think, that Rucka is making. The job that spies do is one that mixes tedious routine and extreme danger, and the effect that has to have on a psyche is fascinating. Rucka has fleshed out the characters of Ed Kittering, Paul Crocker and Angela Cheng, but the story remains tightly focused on Tara Chace, as she deals simultaneously with a budding and dangerous romance and an informant who could help her prevent a national tragedy.
The mixture of the mundane and the dangerous works to elevate everything to a level of danger. When the ramifications of an information leak between departments is not an inter-departmental spat but instead a field agent being killed, political squabbles take on a whole new meaning. And for all the difficulties that policemen have with marriages given the danger and long hours they face, Rucka and Fernandez show in this issue that for spies it's even worse, as they don't even get to enjoy any sort of honeymoon period before they might have to watch their loved one go off to die for no good reason.
There was some wonderful tension in this issue between the characters, made all the more striking for the friendly manner in which they generally interact. Crocker's frustration with Cheng is nothing new, but he expresses it this issue in a way that is pretty harsh. And Tom's constant needling of Crocker during the mission overview is played out in such a way that readers can really feel the tension. Even Tara and Ed get into it a little bit, as Tara puts up her psychological defenses to prevent herself getting hurt, and in so doing manages to hurt Ed. In addition, I absolutely believed the tension about whether or not Ed would get out of Iraq alive, which made reading through the entire issue pretty tense and gave the ending some power.
Though I know there is something of a controversy about the way Leandro Fernandez has been drawing Tara Chace, he may well be my favorite artist on the book so far. The shots of Ed parachuting into Iraq, interspersed with interpersonal moments, are simply stunning, and while I still find some of the characters a tad overstylized, I can't deny that the likenesses are distinctive. Fernandez has a skill with shadow, detail and storytelling that is impressive. In addition, those who have found Tara to be off-model, whether in facial detail (that'd be me) or sex appeal (also me, to some degree) will be happy to know that she looks a lot more like Tara in this issue, and that the one moment where she does look sexy is one in which she absolutely should.
When this book started a year or so ago, I wasn't really sure what to expect, but Rucka's name was enough to sell me on the book. Now that we're well into the third arc, Queen & Country still has the capacity to surprise me, and I find myself enjoying the more personal and political take on espionage as much as I expected to when the book was first released.
