Broken Frontier

After a long hiatus, writer Greg Rucka returns to Queen & Country. Tara Chase returns to duty, as well. We know Rucka’s ready, but is Tara?

This issue of Queen & Country begins where the novel A Gentleman’s Game left off. After falling love with Minder Tom Wallace, watching him die, and going rogue in Saudi Arabia, Tara Chase now returns to England. She’s frazzled, battered and bruised, and suffering from a severe case of post-traumatic stress, but doing her trademark best to hide it. She’s fooling no one, though, least of all her therapist, whose job it is to determine if she’s is fit to resume duty. Director of Operations Paul Crocker, down two Minders now, with no confidence in her possible replacement, wants Tara back on duty immediately. If asked, Tara will do her duty. But can she? Does she want to? Will it take more from her than she’s already lost? And will putting her back in the field be an even bigger risk than leaving her to wither away?

The events in Queen & Country #29 through #33 fit in between the two novels and are covered in the first ten pages of Private Wars. And though the timing could have been better (a little event over at DC called Infinite Crisis gummed-up the works a bit), this issue is an excellent jumping-on point for readers who are new to Tara’s world, as well as those who only know it through the novels. More a narrative bridge, a coda and prologue as opposed to a true first chapter, the explication needed to orient the reader is subtle, communicated more through gesture, innuendo, and verbal exchanges rendered as if the reader knows as much as the characters involved. It’s a risk, to be sure, but Rucka’s fluid narrative rhythm puts a lock on the reader. With a decidedly minimalist approach, he skillfully plays on beats of reaction and feeling, showing virtually everything we really need to know about this story and only telling when he has to. Consequently, the comic is a quick read—if words are the only concern. But if we linger on the images described in the script, if we take note of the subtle emotional transitions from panel to panel in the way this issue demands, it’s not hard to find—in a good way—that the read takes longer than expected.

Rucka’s Queen & Country scripts have always employed intricate plotting, but character has always been the engine of his stories. A strong, dynamic character can draw us into a story and hold our interest in a way that makes the nooks and crannies of backstory and previous events a secondary concern, and Tara Chase is as compelling a character as one will find in comics. Even if we don’t know the trials and tribulations she’s been through, at a gut level we feel their effects on her, see her bruises and stitches as not just physical, but psychological as well. The point driven home so well in this issue is that she’s tried to soothe the pain of her life with boozing and spooking, then found the one thing that possibly could—love—and after losing that, finds herself worse off than she was before. Her pain and grief palpable, real, and compelling, the harder she tries not to, the more she bares it for all willing to notice. And so, the question at the end of this issue isn’t "What’s next" as much as it’s "What’s left?"

A writer who knows that it’s not about the words on the page needs a like-minded artist to illustrate his script so that the reader will not only know it, too, but will feel it. New artist Chris Samnee is up to the task. With deft, sure lines, he’s "aged" Tara psychologically, the effects of her experiences weathering the cast of her face like unseen wrinkles, her posture like she’s a 60 year-old in a 30 year-old’s body. And Samnee’s right on time with the rhythm Rucka’s set and the beats of the panels, his shadowing playing to the moral and emotional grays on his black-and-white pages, his framing engaging our attention in an issue full of talking and flashback, his postures, gestures, and reactions bearing as much of the load of characterization as the words. Samnee’s style is distinctive but unstylized, and all about finding what’s really real in the story, putting it on the page, and leaving everything else out, which is exactly what Queen & Country needs.

There’s more feeling and drama in this prologue than one will find in a lot of final chapters out there, and those who have been away for a while will find themselves hooked on Queen & Country all over again.