5/25/2023 0 Comments Queen and country ruckaTogether with Rucka's clipped, spare dialogue, the work offers the sense that espionage is just another job, exactly as grinding and tedious as any other-except that interoffice politics can get people killed. In fact, nearly everyone in this taut and violent drama seems to sag, physically and emotionally, under the psychological and moral weight of their grim profession. Newcomer artist Rolston combines bold outlines, expressive body language and clean, cartoonish lines for his characters, with detailed, realistic backgrounds it's a trick often used in European comics, and he makes it work here. Chace soon learns she's become a pawn, now with a bounty on her head, in a seemingly endless game of international reprisals and counterreprisals. This volume, which collects the first few issues of the Q&C comic book, opens as Chace carries out an unauthorized assassination in Kosovo-to the consternation of higher-ups, her boss orders her to off a former Russian general running arms to Chechen rebels-then makes a complicated getaway after being wounded. The more screwed-up the protagonist, the better a spy story tends to be, and Rucka (who's also written a series of prose mystery novels) has come up with a memorably dysfunctional antiheroine in Tara Chace, a burned-out, amoral "minder" (i.e., agent) for Britain's Ministry of Intelligence.
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