My comic booking has been a little stagnant lately. Keeping up with The Walking Dead and trying to find new issues of Locke and Key have been all I've really had time for lately, and I decided that it's time for that to change. I threw myself blindly into two new series, Brian K. Vaughn's Saga, and Rat Queens, an Image comic that IGN has been raving about lately. Also, the gentleman who writes Rat Queens is Kurtis Wiebe, who's work I've never read, but a name I vaguely remember an excited fanboy screaming into my face at a D&D get together some time ago. Result? I read the first trade of Rat Queens in just 20 minutes, then re-read it, punched through Saga, then re-read Rat Queens again.
My initial description of Rat Queens to my friends was "Sex in the City in a Dungeons and Dragons universe", but my hindsight knows that isn't the best analogy. Rat Queens is an all-girl merc group with a familiar adventuring build, dwarf/halfling/white mage/black mage that celebrates success with drugs, booze and sex. I like to think that Rat Queens is the shape that true feminism would take if the medieval fantasy world ever really existed. It isn't all mushrooms and vag jokes though, Rat Queens is solidly written, with big creative battles that show just how good the group is at killing things.
I have absolutely fallen in love with these girls, and I've only read a single trade. All four personalities are established quickly and you avoid the rush of name/location memorization that you usually get with a new book series, everything and everyone in Rat Queens are easy to keep track of. The jokes are actually funny, and the inside parody will raise the happy eyebrows of any veteran tabletop RPGer or Skyrim player. I love Rat Queens and I can't wait for some of you reading this to try it out too. I've already ordered Green Wake, Wiebe's most successful project and I patiently await book #2 of this grown-up chick-powered ogre-stabbing fun-orgy. Betty is my favorite.
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