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KILLER PRINCESSES #1
Recommended (8/10)
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Oni Press
Writer: Gail Simone
Artist: Lea Hernandez
Editor: James Lucas Jones
Price: $2.95 US |
Plenty of expectations in the online fan community about this one, as it's an original creation by Gail Simone (whose released comics work thus far has been primarily Simpsons comics) and Lea Hernandez (who has impressed many with her Texas steampunk graphic novels and her Rumble Girls work). It's not as funny as, say, Barry Ween, but it's an original concept and both creators really seem to be in synch in regards to where they want to go with it. There are some wonderful dialogue and slapstick gags, and I can't imagine someone reading Killer Princesses and not having
fun.
So far, Killer Princesses looks like Charlie's Angels by way of the Three Stooges. The girls are dedicated, fun-loving
special operatives who are, collectively, about as smart as a bag of rocks. It's
an interesting dichotomy, seeing how these girls are so professional and deadly
at getting their job done, but they can't seem to match up enough basic
intellect to get song lyrics right, pull off an operation without it getting
messy or learn basic American history. They're the most dangerous kind of
intelligence operative, the ones who will never ever question orders, because
it's lucky that they understood them in the first place.
Despite the three girls
(Faith, Hope and Charity) having similar IQs and skills, they all have
distinctive differences as well. Charity gets the unfortunate distinction of
being the dumbest of the group, clearly unable to function very well in the real
world but also with an underlying sweetness to her that the others lack. Faith
is the hot-headed one, the action-junkie of the bunch, and Hope is the de facto
leader and martial arts expert. She's also the smartest one, the one most likely
to develop a conscience, a point made very effectively in a sequence back at the
sorority house that they call headquarters.
You've got to love the
concept behind this book. A sorority house secretly runs a highly skilled agency
designed to "balance" the world, meaning they do good and bad things, and their
best operatives are the types of popular girls that looked down on everybody
else in high school. Simone walks an interesting tightrope between making the
girls likable and yet completely true to their unlikable personality archetypes,
and much as I would hate any of these girls in real life, I enjoyed reading
about them and sympathizing with them.
Lea Hernandez delivers some
excellent artwork here, conveying a lot of information in short spaces and
keeping up with Simone's fairly-packed story. There were a couple moments during
action sequences where I sometimes felt like I'd missed a panel of storytelling,
but then there are plenty of others where the storytellng is terrific, such as
the "action-less showdown" between Hope and Chen or Charity's climb out of the
elevator shaft. And Hernandez does wonderful work on the background gags,
including... heh... Randy the devoted love slave or the scene where the
aftermath of the Princesses' attack on the kitchen is discovered.
There's a lot to keep up with
in this issue, from the introduction of the main villain and the plot that will
no doubt continue for the rest of the mini-series to the establishing of
characterization of the three girls to the revelation of the basic elements of
the concept. Simone and Hernandez accomplish all of that important storytelling,
and manage to land a few dialogue- and art-based zingers along the way.
Note: Oni Press has expressed its intent to make the missing sixth page available for viewing online. Visit the Oni Press website at www.onipress.com to find out how you can read the missing page.
Email Randy Lander comments about this review, or discuss it on the Fourth Rail message board. |
