2 crampons out of 5
Bloody Mary is a collection of two short series Garth Ennis wrote for the now defunct ‘Helix’ line of comics (which was a DC branch for, I think, sci-fi themed stories) – Bloody Mary and Bloody Mary: Lady Liberty. I’d long been looking forward to reading these, seeing it as something maybe transitional for Ennis between Preacher and some of his later works. And it’s not bad, but seeing as how we aim for whole crampons here, I sided with 2 instead of 3 to denote that the collection is, on a whole, not that satisfying.
See that cover? I’d assumed that would be a central theme. Alas, ’tis not – while our main character, Mary Malone, does wear that outfit a couple times, it’s only to sneak into certain places where a nun wouldn’t be suspected of getting up to any nonsense. Apparently this used to be her trademark move, back in the days when she was part of an elite killing squad, but we’re joining the story years later, in a then alternate future of 2012, where America is no longer a power and there’s some vague European ruling of the world going on.
That’s part of the misstep the series takes right away – it attempts to do an intro to stir some interest in Mary, but then jumps right into a couple pages of blah blah alternate history. Ezquerra’s art is normally pretty gritty and exciting, but the colors used in this era of DC felt bland, giving scenes of this nature (long captions, scenery) a boring wash that the eye just zooms over. This is a stepping stone Ennis has yet to cross as successfully as he did with Preacher: establishing a history within a series. It’s a problem in his current Boys and it’s a problem here – where the story trumps the characters and so takes up a lot of real estate to get it straight. Versus Preacher, where Ennis had the room and time to build up his characters before going into the history of The Grail, and heaven, and etc.
What this means is that everything in Bloody Mary’s two series seems short-changed. It gets a little better in Lady Liberty when Ennis firms things up to have an actual identifiable bad guy and some Ennis-esque weirdo side characters, but the last minute preaching feels as forced, and it’s hard to say whether or not you enjoyed what you read or just read it. I’m leaning toward the latter. Still, for Ennis completists, this is better than his early Goddess, where he hadn’t yet figured out the proper balance of grossness and manliness and gags, but far from the maturity that would creep into his classic series.
vaguely-offensive 