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!
