Sunday 11 May 2014

Rat Queens is like the funniest D&D campaign you've ever played


I've been meaning to write this post for a while, but other stuff kept coming up. Anyway, a few weeks ago I finally got around to reading the first volume of Kurtis J. Wiebe and Roc Upchurch's new series Rat Queens, and it's amazing. I'd been looking forward to reading it since I first heard about it late last year, and it doesn't disappoint. It reminded me a lot of Rich Burlew's Order of the Stick, and I mean that as very high praise.

The premise is simple: four twenty-something women with modern attitudes living in a Dungeons & Dragons-style fantasy world. The plot is good, and I enjoyed how it takes a sharp turn towards the end and goes somewhere completely different from what I was expecting, but it's the characters that drive the book.

There's Hannah, the confrontational mage who's sort of the team's leader; Violet, the hipster fighter who's surprisingly kind-hearted once she stops killing things; Dee, the cleric who kind of stays in the background because she's not great with people (my favourite character); and Betty the thief, who reminded me a lot of Molly from Runaways in that she's basically weaponised cuteness.

It's a terrific cast, and most of the book's humour comes, as it should, from the character dynamics. There is drama in this comic, but it's mostly a fantasy comedy, and it's one of the funniest comics I've read in quite a while. The Rat Queens are all foul-mouthed, hard-drinking adventurers, and they act pretty much like you'd expect people who kill monsters for a living to act. It highlights the absurdity of what these sort of people, so commonplace in D&D, would actually be like in any sort of realistic society: they don't fit in with the town at all, and are as big a threat to it as the monsters they fight.

It's because these characters are so fun and so likeable that we get completed invested in them, and towards the end of the volume when the stakes get higher, Wiebe shows us it's not all laughs: he's great at comedy, but when things take a turn for the serious it's genuinely gut-wrenching. The last issue is full of lovely character beats, and is the point which cemented Dee as my favourite character for reasons I won't spoil. It's a great conclusion to the first arc.

And I can't go without mentioning how refreshing it is to see a comic like this on the stands. Image are on a ridiculous winning streak these days with damn near everything they're publishing being solid gold, and a lot of their success is the drive to do something different with their books. You can't pin their output down to a single genre, and they're doing what Marvel and DC have struggled so hard with: reaching beyond the core audience.

They're making books that aren't just male power fantasy, that people other than teenage boys will want to read, and Rat Queens is a perfect example. The four main characters are all female, which is depressingly rare in itself, one of them is black and one of them is gay. It is so damn gratifying to see a comic which actually puts characters other than straight white men on the page, and as the fan reaction has proved, it's been a huge hit with female readers. It shows how easy it really is to appeal to different audiences: they've made a book for the female demographic, which superhero comics have traditionally found so hard to crack, by writing great female characters. It really is that simple.

Rat Queens is a real treat, and one of my favourite comics currently being published. If you want to read a comic that actually gets women right, go and buy it right now.