Death or Glory vol. 1: She’s Got You

Ah, it’s a new creator-owned series from Rick Remender.  Will it be the kind that relentlessly grinds down its protagonists to the point where it starts being fun (“Deadly Class”), to where you start sympathizing with the antagonist (“Seven to Eternity”), or just plain grinds them down (“Black Science”).  If nothing else the answer is still unclear by the time we reach the end of this first volume of Glory’s adventures. The title character was raised off the grid to be resourceful and fiercely protective of her freedom by her father, Red, who is now dying of liver failure.  Though Glory doesn’t have the funds to get him the medical treatment he needs, she does have a plan to get them: Robbing her scumbag of an ex-husband who works with a surgeon-cum-butcher named Korean Joe in one of the shadiest kinds of businesses.

That this plan goes all kinds of sideways shouldn’t surprise anyone, but it does lead to a reasonably entertaining spectacle of colorful criminals and car chases.  Though the characters don’t have much depth to them, Remender and artist Bengal try to compensate for that by layering on the style. It’s quite successful from an artistic perspective as Bengal serves up some impressively emotive characters and slam-bang action scenes.  Remender’s writing facilitates the action quite well and even if the characters are shallow, they still have some quirks to help define them.

Where he starts to lose me is in his glorification *ahem* of Glory’s off-the-grid lifestyle as the “right” way to live as opposed to how everyone else does.  I’ve seen Remender embrace that kind of moralizing before (looking in your direction “Tokyo Ghost”) and it’s not handled any better in this series. Still it’s impressive to see a first volume (or any volume, really) from the writer end the way it does here.  I hope he didn’t hurt himself writing that kind of ending because, flaws and all, this first volume did get me interested in seeing where Glory’s story goes from here.