#rol comic

I’M NOT ACTUALLY GOING TO SHOW UP AT YOUR HOUSE AND BEG YOU TO READ THEM, BUT I WILL DELIVER A DISSERTATION ON WHY YOU SHOULD AT THE SLIGHTEST PROVOCATION: Night Witch, Detective Stories, The Fey and the Furious

PERFECTLY ACCEPTABLE: Body Work

WE COULD HAVE HAD IT ALLLLLLLL: Cry Fox, Water Weed

HOW MUCH DO YOU LIKE NIGHTINGALE, BE HONEST: Action at a Distance

Let me reiterate: this run as a whole is definitely worth reading, not least because it sticks the landing in this last issue (something the last three runs notably failed to do.)

Everybody else was right - that was fun. Lots of great character moments, an interesting mystery, some international communication, Sahra and Michael Cheung, a Xanadu pastiche!!!!, more of Bev’s family!!!!!!, plus....

I finally got around to reading the last 1.5 issues after chatting to @shadowvalkyrie (I thought I’d finished issue #3 but...I hadn’t). And...well, that is certainly a comic that happened.

There wasn’t anything egregiously terrible on the level of Black Mould or the sun shining where it shouldn’t scene from Water Weed, but mostly I just found it unengaging. The new characters weren’t particularly interesting, the art meant that I kept confusing Nightingale and Strallen, and the main plot was a dull evil-Nazi-serial-killer hunt that mostly resulted in opportunities to show pretty and/or dead women. And as in Water Weed, the interesting plot turned up in the last issue and mostly in voiceover - the concept of a Nazi practitioner getting hired into the British nuclear programme for his magical skills and then poached by the Americans, and linking it to a historical nuclear accident, has plenty of promise! But the serial killer thing led to three issues of blah before we got there, and was frankly a lazy way to make the villain villainous. And the frame story was...not even a story, really; it existed purely to half-maintain the conceit of Peter’s PoV.

Imagine a story where one of Nightingale’s old war buddies brings him evidence that there’s a German practitioner embedded in a top-secret scientific programme, and Nightingale hauls himself out of retirement to investigate, but his superiors tell him to leave it alone and there’s no immediate proof the guy is doing anything bad...and then Nightingale talks to junior staff (Jacqueline!) at the power plant who find the German dude incredibly creepy but are ignored, and there’s pressure being put on the plant to produce more and more plutonium (as in the factual article at the end), and the Americans sniffing around, and the tension builds up, and...goddamit, there’s an interesting story there with Nightingale trying to figure out whether he’s over-indexing on his war experiences and whether the guy’s crimes are intentionally being ignored and what the right thing to do is. And you could tie it to a frame story of Nightingale and Peter debating what to do about someone on their practitioner watch list, give it some moral heft in the present.

But, of course, that story doesn’t have space for Molly giggling at a man in place of characterization, or dead women, or Nightingale killing someone with a smile on his face, and it has the potential for Nightingale *to be wrong*, so where’s the fun in that?

They’re not completely mandatory but several characters cross over and there’s a few references to events that happen in them, so they do expand the world quite a bit. If nothing else you will spend less time going ‘wait, when did THAT happen?’ There are also quite a few good character moments. 

Dutch RoL fandom, THIS IS YOUR MOMENT ( @flutteringazure? @linpatootie?)

SPECIAL NOTE: I’m not putting this under a spoiler cut because this is a Cry Fox spoiler as far as I’m concerned. 

I think it’s been a while since I did a Rate the RoL Comics post, so…why not? Also, before THT I did some summaries of the then-out comics to help people who weren’t going to or hadn’t read them; if people would be interested in ones for the newer comics, then sing out. 

READ IT UNLESS YOU CAN’T/CAN’T STAND THE COMICS:

Detective Stories

Set between The Hanging Tree and Lies Sleeping, focuses on four cases Peter has worked over the years and on Peter and Lesley’s relationship as police officers. Just really fantastic. 

Night Witch 

Fun adventure, lots of badass Varvara and Varvara backstory, and a little arc for Beverley as well. Introduces Maksim, who’s shown up a couple of times in the books. 

The Fey and the Furious

Many spoilers for Lies Sleeping so save until you’ve read that, but this is just a lovely run whose major flaw is not being a novella. Featuring: the famous Ferrari, BEVERLEY POINT OF VIEW, whales, unicorns, and Peter once again saving the day with architecture. Did I mention Bev is great in this? Bev is GREAT in this. 

NOT QUITE AS GOOD AS THE LAST TWO BUT NOT BAD:

Body Work

The first RoL comic run. The art is a little shaky but it’s a good procedural case and there’s some great Guleed and Stephanopoulos moments. 

WOULD BE HIGHER THAN THIS BUT HAVE ONE MAJOR FLAW:

Action at a DistanceNightingale (and technically Molly) post-WWII adventure, which is…not terrible at any point except that it revolves around a serial killer going after beautiful women (BORING) and absolutely squanders a really interesting plot hook because it’s too busy running after a serial killer. For people who really love Nightingale. 

Cry Fox

The source of the “Nightingale on a horse” reference. That’s the good news. The bad news is that it manages to make “Nightingale riding to the rescue (literally)” an anti-climax that ruins the emotional arc of what has been, until that point, quite a good Guleed and Abigail adventure. I semi-seriously recommend just reading the first three issues and then saying “And then they escaped and the bad guys were arrested and everybody lived happily ever after” instead of reading the fourth. 

Water Weed

A BOLD CHOICE TO GO HERE but I thought it was a good procedural with some nice Peter, Nightingale, and Beverley character moments, and a neat female villain…whose arc is thoroughly side-tracked by a weird, extended, and very male gaze-y softcore porn sex scene in issue #3, forcing vital plot information to be delivered at speed in voiceover in issue #4. Aside from that…not bad? 

ARE YOU A COMPLETIONIST OR TOTALLY STARVED FOR ROL CONTENT? THEN….

Black Mould

Absolutely, no problem at all - it’s a frame story of Peter sitting his detective exam with him telling his examiner about four cases he’s worked on, with flashbacks to the cases forming the bulk of the individual issues. You don’t need any context from prior comics.