Curse Words vol. 3: The Hole Damned World

Wizord’s story takes a backseat in this volume so that writer Charles Soule and artist Ryan Browne can focus on two key members of the supporting cast:  Marsupial-loving Margaret and living, breathing French joke Jacques Zaques. The latter becomes less of a joke in this volume (well, insomuch as a Frenchman named Jacques Zaques can be) as he makes the best of his current situation in the Hole World.  That includes working with its magical overlord Sizzajee to find out what happened to his sons who were transported over there back in the first volume. To my surprise, Jacques’ quest wasn’t really played for laughs and the few that we got were mainly of the dark variety.  That’s actually a plus in my book since I wound up being able to take the Frenchman seriously as a character for the first time in this series. Jacques genuinely struggles to find out what has happened to his sons and the results were not what I was expecting. Granted, the character does get an extreme makeover at the end of the volume that wouldn’t be out of place in an Image comic from the 90’s, but after this volume I’m actually interested in seeing how his rematch with Wizord goes now that he’s got the juice to extract his vengeance.

Margaret, on the other hand, remains in our world for the entirety of this volume kept under lock and key by a couple of government agents.  Their goal is to extract all the information about Wizord they can from Margaret, who only tells them that they’ve signed their death warrants by kidnapping her.  Margaret’s story doesn’t carry the same emotional heft as Jacques’ (yes, really), but it at least makes some notable contributions to the overall story. We find out that this world also has its own magical people, though none of them can compete with a powered-up Wizord or Ruby Stitch, and one of them, a Tarot card reader named Candace, winds up becoming Margaret’s friend.  That relationship leads to some interesting developments by the end of the volume, including one that’s likely to cause some repercussions that will have to be dealt with in the next volume. Which is definitely still on my reading list after another satisfying volume like this one.