Jennifer Blood 1

Fuck me, there are NINE different covers for this comic. Are people still buying multiple copies of these things in the hope of big profits or something? Or from completist obsessions? I didn’t like any of them much, to be honest.

The basic idea here is one that promises some fun: ordinary suburban wife and mother by day, leather-clad vigilante by night, having drugged her family. It’s revealed towards the end that there is some sort of familial personal motive in this, though we don’t get details – I would take a punt on being abused as a child, personally, but Ennis may surprise me.

The contrasts are handled very smartly, with some wit – I particularly liked the bit about reading Guns & Ammo while getting a manicure, and the final scene in bed with her husband after her night of mayhem and slaughter, with a last page that is funny and tells us a lot about her personality very economically.

I’m not sure where this will go, after an entertaining enough start – wringing entertainment out of the two lives will surely be a case of diminishing returns, and I don’t know how much one will bleed into the other. The personal background that prompted this behaviour needs to be more than just a plot motor, I think, and maybe the one scene showing her taking brutal, rather offhand revenge for a minor offence promises more complexity. Ennis is good enough that I have some interest in the answers to these matters.

The art is just about up to the job, handling action with some impact and domestic moments with a suitably light touch, but there are aspects I am less keen on. There’s one weird moment of discontinuity between script and art, where our heroine is fighting a guy who she describes as “three hundred pounds of muscle”, when he clearly can’t be more than 200. I also had a bit of a problem where I thought two characters were the same person, which given that they are both big, overweight middle-aged bald guys is rather careless design. Oddest is the inking style, which looks like a normal pencilling style – I’m not sure if this is a deliberate stylistic choice or a lack of technique with inks, but we do end up with overly heavy and sketchy lines in some places, so I am not persuaded it works.

I suppose in the end this is just a bit of fun, but it also strikes me as something that might get made into a movie before long, as its entertainment value would transfer pretty seamlessly. Whether it will be fun enough to persist with the comic is an open question, but I may well buy the next issue.