Portland writer and Eisner Award nominee Kelly Sue DeConnick and artist Emma Ríos’ series Pretty Deadly is aptly named. It’s just that: pretty and deadly.
The whole volume is perfect for this time of year, when the veil is thin and we become so much more intrigued by death.
To start, the story’s narrators are a butterfly and a dead bunny. They’re appropriate narrators for a book in which all of the characters are animals, named after animals, dead or just Death itself, creating a wonderful mix of death, life, beast and humanity.
Even the genre is a weird chimera of historical western and magical realism.
Sissy, one of the few characters not named after an animal, is a tiny girl with heterochromia who dresses like a vulture and tells a story about a woman named Beauty hidden away in a tower by her husband, the Mason Man.
The tower is reminiscent of a tarot card or the tale of Rapunzel, and Beauty begged for death to take her away from her imprisonment. Death fell in love with her and eventually granted her request, but she left him with a child.
Sissy travels with a blind man named Fox who is just positively sitting on a bunch of secrets, and it turns out everything is just a culmination of fate and death and everything you could want in a modern myth.
This is exactly what Pretty Deadly is: a modern myth following a little girl’s ascension into becoming the new Death in a very Dread Pirate Roberts-fashion, though Death Sr. is less pleased to give up the title than Wesley’s predecessor was.
But what’s best about Pretty Deadly, besides the glorious mythological plot, is DeConnick’s expansive female cast. Death, Fox and Coyote are the only men, the others are all women and girls.
It’s definitely amazing and relieving to have a story that’s gorgeous, interesting and almost totally populated by strong women from different backgrounds with diverse personalities, races and motivations.
Female characters are always so iffy. They’re often either frigid, murdered or otherwise boiled down to their most basic relationships to men.
In Pretty Deadly, the only time a woman serves a man’s motivation it’s the catalyst for everything going horribly wrong. Not to mention the man gets his butt kicked in retribution.
All of which makes me all the more excited and hopeful for DeConnick’s upcoming series Bitch Planet which, despite the gendered slur in the title, looks ridiculously good.
The series is coming out this year and follows five women as they break out of prison. Like Pretty Deadly, it’s a mix of genres since they’re five women in a prison that’s in outer space.
Cue sixties science fiction music. And if the comic’s cover—a large feminine hand, too well-manicured for prison perhaps, flipping off a distant planet—is any indication, it’s going to be a fantastically campy ride.
And haven’t we all been there at one time or other in our lives? Criminals, shooting the bird at prison planets?