While I admire the Rat Queens, I don't necessarily feel the book is written for women, and that's where I'm deducting my half star. There's nothing "lady-like" about these women.
Have you ever seen a troll deep throat a broadsword the size of a Shetland pony? If you've read issue 4, you have. There is an excessive amount of drug and alcohol use, bad language, (including the c-word if that's a dealbreaker,) casual sex, and rude gestures, but it's the close-up, gorily detailed brain that pushed it over the edge for me. Each issue gives a little backstory on one of the girls, (Hannah had a thing with the captain of the guard, Betty's girlfriend has left her, Violet's brother wants her to come home, and Dee's parents worship a flying squid,) but the comics are mostly about butchering thine enemies.
Thus begins our five issue arc as the girls search for and confront their attacker. The Rat Queens are sent to kill a pack of goblins that they just cleared out last month, (damn those respawn times,) but once they make their way to the cave, they're confronted by an assassin's trap. The story starts with four quartets of adventurers being assigned quests to make up for yet another bar fight. A scene where Dee explains how her magic works when she doesn't believe in God is punctuated with another character asking, "why haven't we ever talked about this before?" "Convenience." It's aware of the fantasy tropes and it's having a good time playing to them. This gives us Violet and Hannah, a relatively standard, if blood thirsty, hipster fighter and rockabilly mage respectively, but it also leads to Betty, the Smidgen (Halfling) hippy thief, who loves free love, candy, and psychedelic mushrooms, and my favorite, Dee, the atheist human cleric. The standard D&D races and classes are represented, but what makes the Queens different is each also has an aesthetic that influences her personality. This modern spin on an old school genre is a violent monster-killing epic that is like Buffy meets Tank Girl in a Lord of the Rings world on crack! It's also a darkly comedic sass-and-sorcery series starring Hannah the Rockabilly Elven Mage, Violet the Hipster Dwarven Fighter, Dee the Atheist Human Cleric and Betty the Hippy Smidgen Thief.
A pack of booze-guzzling, death-dealing battle maidens-for-hire, and they're in the business of killing all god's creatures for profit.
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