Graphic Novel Review: God Save the Queen by Mike Carey & John Bolton - Page 2

Much of this could've been rescued with a suitably decadent art style, I suspect, but though John Bolton has shown himself to be quite adept as going pre-Raphaelite in the past, here his painted art is too stilted and inconsistent to do the trick. (Never could figure out what age Ava's mom is supposed to be, but it varies by a good two decades throughout the volume.) We get multiple poses of Linda showing off her skinny legs and all, but when it comes to actual plot movement the visuals get pretty muddy: when a castle column, for instance, cracks and falls down on a character, it takes prolonged page study just to get what's supposed to've happened. At times, you get the sense that Bolton, the artist, is more invested in the full-page portraits that regularly grace the book than in the mechanics of telling a simple comic book story.

That noted, there were a few aspects of Queen that I enjoyed: though it starts out reading like a broad anti-drug polemic (my sense is that Carey was trying for a GN Trainspotting but instead wound up with Reefer Madness), in the end it attempts to toss a bit of ambiguity into the mix by making our heroine's red horse use a key to defeating Queen Mab. Too, the Queen our mother & daughter tie their allegiance to proves almost as imperiously treacherous as Mab: a believable character fillip that even I could recognize as Gaiman-esque. "If you're thinking of executing me for treason," one character warns Titania just before the battle starts, "you'd better pick a different venue." Clearly, this is not noble King Richard returning to Nottingham from the Crusades.

But these small pleasures weren't enough, unfortunately, to save God Save for me. Of the Vertigo hardback fantasies released within the last year, I found Bill Willingham's Fables: 1001 Nights of Snowfall to be more consistently entertaining (with better Bolton art in it to boot!) No Sex Pistols lyrics in Fables, but you can't have everything . . .

Article Author: Bill Sherman

Bill Sherman is a Books editor for Blogcritics. With his lovely wife Rebecca Fox, he has recently co-authored a sudsy comic fat acceptance novel entitled Measure By Measure.

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