Molly Brooks recommends Pretty Deadly vol. 1 (prettydeadlycomic)
Probably the first thing you’ll notice about Pretty Deadly is that it’s super gorgeous. The art— both Emma Rios’s brushwork and Jordie Bellaire’s (jordiecolorsthings) fantastic coloring— reminds me a lot of the covers Yuko Shimizu’s done for Vertigo’s series The Unwritten. The colors are wild and dreamlike, the imagery lovely and surreal. Pretty Deadly is just a joy to look at, and it works together with Kelly Sue DeConnick’s (kellysue) writing really well.
The story is a magical-realist fable set in the old west, about Death and his kingdom encroaching on the world of men, as told to a butterfly by the skeleton of a murdered rabbit. It follows the journey of a little beggar girl with mismatched eyes and a vulture crown, a blind man who once did something terrible, and the various people and forces hunting them down. The narrative unfolds gradually, with characters kept deliberately mysterious and their motivations and relationships revealed out of order. It’s a well-crafted and satisfying story, but we’re given answers before we know the questions, and it definitely rewards patience and a re-read. the fact that it’s so crazy pretty kept me engaged long enough for the threads to start coming together, and the story is definitely worth the journey.
It’s eery and dreamlike, but also full of swordfights and shootouts and revenge and broken hearts; there’s a really nice balance struck between mythology and good old-fashioned spaghetti-western gunslinging.
Volume 1 includes the self-contained first arc told in issues #1-5. I highly recommend picking it up!
(tip: if you’re into violent western-themed fantasy stories featuring anthropomorphic personifications of death, you may also like East of West.)
[Read Pretty Deadly vol. 1 on comiXology]
For fans of: westerns, mythology, art, female leads
molly brooks is an artist from nashville currently living in brooklyn. she works at comixology as a digital editor.