Sunday, November 05, 2023

Sunday Splash Page #295

 
"Another Bad Break-Up," in Kim and Kim: Love is a Battlefield #1, by Magdalene Vissagio (writer), Eva Cabrera (artist), Claudia Aguirre (colorist), Zakk Saam (letterer)

Released the year after the initial Kim and Kim mini-series, Love is a Battlefield picks up with the bounty hunters still living paycheck to paycheck (if that), but with the opportunity for a big score. All they have to do is recover a stolen data chip (that's encoded as a virus in a guy's blood, weird dimension they live in.)

Oh, and not let the blood sample get immediately stolen by Kim D.'s shitty ex-girlfriend. But what are the odds of that happening?

With that relationship disaster established in the first issue, the remaining three are the Fighting Kims (apparently Kim D. came around on the name) trying to find the shitty ex and their payday, plus a lot of arguing about their poor choices in relationships. Because, in addition to Kim D. getting hoodwinked by her ex-girlfriend, Kim Q. has been hooking up with an old, I don't know, they were friends before Kimko's transition, but then hated each other at some point?

There's a lot of finger-pointing and harsh words, which Vissagio and Cabrera break up with bar fights and giant robots. Kim D. gets angry and broods, Kim Q. gets angry and starts random fights. It keeps things from getting monotonous with the leads defending their bad decisions.

Although the thing I really notice is the sense that the other characters are advancing their lives, while the Kims are kind of stuck in neutral. In the five years since the break-up, Laz has gone from doing transport protection working to stealing the kind of codes you implant in someone's RNA for protection, on behalf of massive space-terrorist groups calling themselves the Adversary. The Kims' friend Kathleen just bought herself a space freighter as another step in a plan to become a mercenary queen.

Meanwhile, the Kims are still living out of their (barely) space-worthy VW bus as often as not, scrambling for a payday Kim Q. will want to blow on a voice modulator for their cat. Kim Q. seems pretty satisfied, but Laz describes Kim D. as having a whole plan for her life, and the reader's got to wonder how well the plan is progressing. That comes to a head in the 3rd - and thus far, final - mini-series, but we won't see that one for about two years.

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