Pretty Deadly Volume 2: The Bear

Gorgeous and horrifying, Pretty Deadly's reapers - Ginny and Alice - go to the trenches of World War One to do battle with the Reaper of War. This book is incredible, with a visual language and story-telling rhytym and grand mythical structure that's unlike anything else out there.

The second volume of the Pretty Deadly series, The Bear doesn't follow on directly after The Shrike, but instead picks up several decades after the events of the previous book, deep in the heart of the horrors of World War I. DeConnick's writing is still terse and pointed, Rios' artwork is still beautiful and hypnotic, and the story is still epic in scale and intensely personal in nature. In short, this is an excellent follow-up to an excellent opening act that serves to deepen the background and carry forward the overall narrative.

The most crucial difference between this volume and the previous one is that of tone. The Bear takes the mythic and at times ethereal nature of Pretty Deadly and grounds it quite firmly in our world. While show more The Shrike took place in a time no more distinct than "sometime when revolvers where the height of firearm technology, and in a location no more specific than "the Old West", The Bear quite explicitly takes place during World War I, and many of the events of the book are quite clearly located in France, in the trenches of the Western Front. This grounding givens the entire volume a different feel than the previous volume: Grittier, more visceral, and more tragic. By carrying the fairy-tale like atmosphere forward from the first volume, and weaving it together with the all too real horrors of the Great War, DeConnick and Rios have revealed the true terror behind the magical and almost airily surreal supernatural elements of the story. This contrast drives the book forward, and gives the book weight and strength that could not be achieved without this mixture.

Despite the years between the previous volume and this one, almost all of the characters from The Shrike return in The Bear, which isn't really all that surprising given that most of them are nigh-immortal servants of Death itself. Both the Bunny and the Butterfly are present in this volume, serving their roles as a framing device to help narrate the story. Deathface Ginny and Fox are back, as are Big Alice and Johnny Coyote. Sissy, the current incarnation of Death, and an elderly Sarah Fields, at the very end of her life both return in this volume as well. Sarah's impending death provides the impetus for the story, as Fox comes to reap her into Death's domain, while Sarah's daughter Verine demands a reprieve so that her brother Cyrus can return home to bid their mother farewell. This is complicated by the fact that Cyrus is away in France, fighting on the Western Front and making friends with Frenchmen and cavalry horses.

To a certain extent, the plot of The Bear is not the point of the story. Instead, the real meat of the book is in how it develops the mythology that underpins the world that DeConnick and Rios have created. In this volume, the nature of the reapers is made more clear - especially where they come from and why. In these pages, we not only see a clash between two reapers over the course of the First World War, we also see the birth of a new reaper born in the shadow of that conflict. Since this is Pretty Deadly, this birth is accompanied by death, as nothing can happen in this series that is not paired with death. One interesting element is that the line between life and death in Pretty Deadly is so indistinct: Characters slip from life into death without even knowing it, and without the reader even noticing until later, when the fact that these characters are no longer living is brought to one's attention. In a very real sense, death sneaks up on both the characters and the reader, wrapped up in pretty riddles and parables that cloak its real nature until it is too late.

The mythology of the book also revolves around the symbolic stories that it uses, and in this volume the most notable such story revolves around the characters of Johnny Coyote and Molly, the Reapers of Luck. Which reaper represents good luck and which is bad luck is not clear, and as Johnny Coyote points out, that's more or less the point. Their story is told using a folksy tale involving a Chinese farmer, a runaway horse, the farmer's son, and the Emperor's soldiers, with the repeated refrain "Good luck, bad luck, who knows?" This piece of folklore is reflected in the path followed by Cyrus and his fellow soldiers, as they come across things that both hearten and dismay them, as they believe their fortunes have turned for the better, or turned for ill. The problem is that neither they, nor the reapers who circle around them invisibly, can know the ultimate meaning of these happenstances until they reach the end of their journey. In a related tale (which serves as the basis for the title of the volume), the bunny and the butterfly tell a story about a bear and a hive of bees, in which the hungry bear tries to get into the hive to eat the honey and larvae found within, but is driven off by the stings of the bees. The butterfly asserts that this is wonderful, which the bunny agrees with, provided one is a bee. Once again, the story highlights how whether something is good or bad depends entirely upon one's perspective - as the bunny says, "the needs of the bear are not the same as the needs of the bee". One might even say, what is good for death is not good for the living, and the needs of the reapers are not the same as the needs of their quarry.

Pretty Deadly, Vol. 2: The Bear is a maturation of the beautiful and affecting story begun in The Shrike. Taking the fable-driven story introduced in the first volume and melding it with the harsh reality of one of the most vicious and destructive events in real world history results in a final product that is both hauntingly stunning and horrifyingly brutal. This combination of the mundane and the supernatural makes the mythic elements seem more fairy-tale-like, but also roots them in a reality that grounds them at the same time, while it takes the bitter harshness of war and elevates it to the status of fable. With this volume, DeConnick and Rios have taken the strong story they launched with the first installment and raised it up to even greater heights of excellence.

This review has also been posted to my blog Dreaming About Other Worlds. show less

Wow, I didn't expect Volume 2 to be worse than Volume 1, but it managed! The images were sometimes impossible to follow. The framing devices are still unexplained, obvious, and distracting (also one is legit repeated in its entirety at the beginning of one issue after it was just portrayed in the previous issue). Whatever rules of reaping the reader can gather from the incoherent plot are broken and inconsistent with the previous volume (If reapers always travel in pairs, why didn't they in Volume 1? If it's always, shouldn't Ginny and Alice have known that going in to fight War? Why does it conveniently take Alice many moments to dissolve into butterflies to make that "revelation" when she dissolved instantly twice in Volume 1? Why show more won't Sissy put her back together when she obviously did between the two volumes? Why aren't the consequences for Ginny no longer having a companion discussed at all?).

Those are just some of the questions and holes in the story. The ideas are intriguing: reapers, reapers in pairs, the relationships between them, ordinary folk ascending into reaperhood, etc, but the execution here is so poor. Overall, extremely frustrating, jarring, underdeveloped series. show less

Note: May Contain Spoilers

We open shortly after the first volume. Sissy, having taken over the mantle of death, sends Alice and Ginny to capture errant Reapers, who have long run wild without the careful attention of Death.
One reaper, in particular, The Reaper of War, who rides the Reaper of Fear, has started the War to End All Wars. And young Cyrus, the son of Sarah Fields, is trapped in a trench; face the brutal world created by the Reaper of War.
In particular, what I enjoyed about this story was the idea of Reaper. Each Reaper has a particular type or kind of Reaping. Ginny is the Reaper of Vengeance, Alice the Reaper of Cruelty. But another, he is the Reaper of Grace. The idea that each reaper is give task to reap a certain type of show more person and to reap in a certain way – it’s so brilliant it hurts!
Told with stark reds and blacks, stylized lines, and creative use of the panels, this story is dark, bloody, full of terror – and hope. There is a beauty to the death, to the madness, a sense of right and order, even in the midst to the pain. To read it, is like reading poetry about death.
Excellent, worth reading.
This is suitable for high school age children and up. There is limited language and sexual content, but extensive violence and blood. This is not a happy book. show less

Another beautiful volume in the Pretty Deadly saga, which uses real-world American western, and World War I settings to explore a new mythology of reapers, once-human spirits tasked with overseeing certain tasks concerning archetypes, including fear, war, and death in the mortal world. I did find the cast a little big to keep perfectly straight who was who exactly to each other in the course of the story, and so a re-read of both volumes may be helpful to make sense of some particular story-threads. However, the overall scope and ambition of the book is impressive, and the artwork both beautiful and unique. If I could give it four-and-a-half stars I would, though I'm not quite at five stars for it.

Gorgeous artwork & solid storytelling (though not quite as epic as that in The Shrike).

I am not a bee, but I am small.
I like to see small things win.

There’s never been a war like him before.

The story arc in Pretty Deadly, Volume 2: The Bear isn’t nearly as epic as that in The Shrike, and I prefer the Wild West setting to WWI. But the storytelling is still pretty solid and, as always, the artwork is some of the loveliest I’ve ever seen in a graphic novel.

The Bear takes place several decades after The Shrike, and Sarah Fields – the BAMF gunslinger whose tears gave life to the savior of humanity – lay in bed dying. Who better to reap her than her old flame Fox? But daughter Verine isn’t ready to let Sarah go yet – not until show more her brother Cyrus returns home to say his final goodbyes. He’s got until the next full moon; can he make it back from the battlefields of France in time?

Meanwhile, Death’s got a lot on her plate. The Reaper of War’s gone rogue, sending ten thousand people her way every. single. day. The cycle of life and death makes the world go ‘round, but this is out of hand! Sissy sends Deathface Ginny and Big Alice to the Western Front to bring an end to the conflict – by any means necessary.

Like I said, the story is engaging, but a bit of a letdown in comparison to Sissy’s origin story in Volume 1. But it was great to see old friends: Sissy, who’s been tending the garden for several decades and is now a young woman; a (slightly) warmer and fuzzier Fox; Sarah, who lived a long and fruitful life, as evidenced by all the people – “whole damn family and half the territory” – who have gathered at her bedside; Johnny Coyote and Molly Raven; and our unflinchingly creepy narrators/observers, bunny and butterfly.

War’s a little trickier: his silly string quality makes a mess of certain panels, such that I sometimes had trouble following the action. Otherwise the art is stellar, as usual. I especially enjoyed reading more about the thought that went into certain scenes in the extras.

The back matter’s pretty shiny, and includes an essay written by Kelly Sue DeConnick (“Dead to Rights,” which originally appeared in Pretty Deadly #1); pin-ups by various artists; and a Q&A between DeConnick and Emma Ríos where they talk process (“Shots Taken,” originally printed in Pretty Deadly #7). Oh, and there’s a fun little story about how Raven freed the moon by Chad Collier (“The Disgrace of the Scoundrels Johnny Coyote and Lady Molly Raven as Seduced by a Beguiling Moon”; originally printed in Pretty Deadly #1 & #2).

http://www.easyvegan.info/2016/10/26/pretty-deadly-volume-2-by-kelly-sue-deconni... show less

A little more cohesive than the first, but still irritating with its narrative. I want to fight this book. Every story doesn’t have to be linear, but it needs to make sense at some point. The reader should be able to have an “ah-hah” moment. This volume has a bit of a spotlight on Sarah, which I liked. Her family is beautiful. I’m not really sure why she loves him/they’re in love. He brought a lot of trouble to her doorstep and almost got her precious baby boys killed last volume and her brutally beaten. I guess they bonded over Sissy? Whatever.

so, Johnny is a reaper and he can turn into a coyote. Okay, that makes sense considering his last name. But he has a sister molly? And they constantly switch their roles of good and show more bad luck !?! sigh

2.5 show less