It’s magic, and sleight of hand. Is it a comic book to purchase, or should you whisper on by?
Pretty Deadly: The Rat #1 is from Image. Written by Kelly Sue DeConnick, art by Emma Rios, with colouring by Jordie Bellaire.
For those new to the game of Pretty Deadly, (like me), there is some catching up to do. But let’s skip all that for now, and talk in general about this issue.
It’s not easy to simplify, and even reading the three-page editorial and creator interviews at the conclusion of the book will leave some of us scratching our heads. Oh well, here goes: on the surface, this is a story about Hollywoodland in the 1930s. A dead body has been discovered. Forget about the victim’s photo ID, an anachronistic anomaly. The police visit the next of kin, a ‘Conjure-man’, or pseudo-psychic seance man.
From there, things get much more poetic, mythical and mesmerizing.
Incredibly deeply conjured and conceived, The Rat is a fascinating, deeply layered tale of death, reapers, butterflies and the interaction of the quick and the dead.
The art style is elegant and multifaceted. Too all-encompassing to fully describe in a sentence, the panels and pages emerge magnificently like magic from Emma Rios. To the untrained eye, she makes it all look effortless, but the interview reveals how much groundwork and thought she applies. Colourist Jordie Bellaire adds a muted, fluted, jazzy improv of tone. Never garish, subdued but alive and probing, this is a well-designed tour-de-force.
Image, Pretty Deadly: The Rat #1, $3.99 for 26 pages of comic content, Rated Mature
Newsdesk 
Brian Isaacs - Executive Editor / Publisher
“Forget about the victim’s photo ID, an anachronistic anomaly.” Wow, good catch! We’re doing a little research to see if we should correct for the trade. Do you know when photo ids came into widespread use?
Hi Kelly Sue, thanks for your note. I had a look online, and it looks like California started putting photos on their Driver’s Licenses back in 1958.
I live in Canada, and my province didn’t have License photo ID until many years later.
It probably varies from state to state, country to country.
Cheers
Alan
Cool, thank you. We had this — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Photo_identification — which put first use at 1876. I’m wondering if we can fudge and make it a Monumental Studios work id.
Thinking this through. Thanks again.