2 out of 5

A lack of editing and plain and – I’m sorry to say – occasionally ugly art mar what seems like an interesting concept with a clever title and good title design.  A girl and her boyfriend sit and discuss the girl’s decision to take a wish before ‘the pantheon,’ the wish something about needing to save her brother.  The whats and whys are kept cloudy, and whether or not they’re eventually explained, it’s a nice way of shunting the tale into a non-real universe: our hero, Amarosa, is told that for her wish to be fulfilled, she must win several battles, which are accessed through mystical doors leading to mystical worlds and narrated by a little cupid announcer.  It’s out there, but Pinckney doesn’t try to smack us with world-building, letting the story just happen, and so it works.  Soo Lee’s art has an early-era Becky Cloonan inky sketchiness, and while her figures have a nice and loose charm to them, her backgrounds are non-existent and action is generally indiscernible beneath too many action lines.  Publisher Action Lab is also an indie indie publisher, meaning our production leaves us with some pretty drab coloring.  So it’s not really an eye-catching book, falling back on the story, which would seem to be structured as one battle per book, framed by these boyfriend / girlfriend discussions and some fairly clunky attempts to insert character exploration for Amarosa via bad guy monologues.

The rough edges of the story could be excused thanks to the interested setup, but even by the second issue, the book feels like its stalling, the sense of discovery of issue one behind it and Pinckney sticking too closely to a clear format to add more depth to his tale.  It’s tough that poor production brings the experience down, but even looking past that, ‘Fight Like a Girl’ needs some more definition to hold interest.