We discovered Queen & Country on the Totally Top Secret Fifty Cent Rack last year. Someone blessed us by leaving about 2/3 of the series there, and it was easy enough to fill in the rest with VF/NM copies at about a buck a piece.
We have read many of Greg Rucka’s crime and detective stories before, but this is our favorite. Rucka made his mark at DC with his work on Batman in Detective Comics, among others. We prefer his indie short stories like Felon for Image/Top Cow, and Oni Press titles Whiteout and Stumptown. Queen & Country, also from Oni Press, proved as enjoyable as any of these, if not more.
It takes a while to get into the series if you read it like a novel, due to Rucka’s insistence on action above introspection. We get right into the thick of things with the characters without much context as to who they are. Only as they begin to deal with the consequences of their spy operations do we begin to bond with them and see what they are made of.
Told in chapters over five or six issues at a time, Queen & Country brings in a different art team for each chapter. Each dynamically different style gives us a new sense of the characters, too. We see them conceptualized anew with each new story arc. You might expect that to throw off the flow of the title, but it only deepened our enjoyment. Rucka’s scripts show us his characters more than tell us about them in exposition. Each art team shows in a unique way.
We sold a nice collection of the series in single issues on eBay recently. You can find most of the series in stock as single issues and trade paperbacks. The Definitive Edition also collects these plus all the Queen & Country: Declassified spin-offs that delve into our secret agents’ past. It’s a great action/spy/adventure series we hope to read again!
Tara Chace is one of my all time favorite comic book characters. If you haven’t checkout the three Q&C novels. I hope they do her justice when the movie finally comes around.
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We will have to check those novels out. All of our Rucka reading has been confined to his comic books so far! Q&C reminded us of one of our favorite spy thrillers, “Day of the Jackal,” with its focus on observing dramatic action and events without much introspection or internal dialogue written out for the reader. Thanks for the recommendation!
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Rucka started out as a novelist. When he was at Rose City Comicon last year he said that when he writes the books it is more just him where the comic books are more of a group project. (He wasn’t saying it was bad but that it just a different style)
Also it fills in a lot of what happens between the comics including what happened to Tom Wallace.
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