Babs #6 // Review
She’s about to go into battle and she’s drinking quite heavily. There’s a man standing next to her looking quite wide-eyed. He asks her if it’s a strength elixir. She’s not really answering his question. She’s shrugging it off. She’s got to head into a battered keep to kick some ass in Babs #6. Writer Garth Ennis concludes the opening series of his sword and sorcery adventure comedy with artist Jacen Burrows and colorist Andy Troy. The lightly silly fun of fantasy comedy dances smoothly across the page before coming to rest at the end of the final issue.
Babs is launching herself right into the heart of a very dangerous situation, but she doesn’t seem to have a hell of a lot of fear about it. She’ll be fine. Even when her momentum runs-out, she’s still got a tremendous amount of energy rolling through it all and she should be able to handle it quite well. Of course...when an armored gentleman starts pummeling the hell out of her while she’s unarmed, her magical sword is going to have to convince an orc to throw it back to her so that it can help save her life.
Ennis concludes his strange, crude, little comedy with a fun sort of an ending. In this series, some of the dialogue is cringing down. Some of the jokes are incredibly dull. on the whole, though, it IS a fun series of events that have a slight satirical bite to them that occasionally feels like it’s reaching for something deeper than the traditional sort of light humor that so often populates fantasy spoofs. Above all, Babs has been able to achieve a kind of characcter development through her first six issues that deinitely suggests that it. could be something more than entirely superficial if it were to continue into a second series.
Once again, Burrows’ art follows the crudeness of the script quite well. Ennis hands the artist quite a few interesting challenges over the course of the issue. Of particular note in the second issue is a point in battle in which the title character bits out an opponent’s eye through he fully masked helmet. Burrow’s actually does a pretty good job of making that moment almost kind of look believable. Beyond that, Troy’s colors add considerable atmosphere to Babs’ final outing of her first series.
It can be difficult to find a new ground for sword and sorcery spoofery how many decades it's been running for. Just as it's difficult to tell a truly new sword and sorcery story every bit is difficult to do something fresh and original for a spoof of the genre. Ennis and company seem to be doing a pretty good job of finding some new ground and a reasonably novel voice for a whole new character who is an identity all her own. It might not make much impact beyond so many other entries in its genre, but it is a lot of fun.
