Gunblast Girls v1 by Crisse cover detail
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Gunblast Girls v1: “In Your Face, Loser!”

Crisse is an amazing artist. He’s the kind of artist that drew me to European comics in the first place. His work is dynamic, creative, detailed, colorful, and a whole lot of fun.

“Gunblast Girls” is kind of like what “Danger Girls” would be if it went in a sci-fi direction.

Unfortunately, it fails, but it’s still a pretty book. It’s interesting to see how and why it fails, though, so come with me on this ride.

CreDDits

Gunblast Girls v1 cover
Original Title: “Gunblast Girls v1: Dans Ta Face, Minable!”
Writer: Crisse
Artist: Crisse
Colorist: Besson
Translator: Jessie Aufiery
Letterers: Cromatik Ltd.
Published by: Lombard/Europe Comics
Number of Pages: 57
Original Publication: 2017

What’s Going On?

Before they leave the building, they need a jacket

The Gunblast Girls are getting back together for a quick money-making romp. All they have to do is rob a pay train on one planet, abduct a teenager, and deliver everything to their contractor on another planet.

Along the way, one member of the gang has to be convinced to take the job and many bad guys are coming after them. As a bonus, the teenager has a special power that upends their attempts to get her to safety. Things get complicated, fast.

At its core, it’s the classic heist framework of one last job and getting the old team back together. Along the way, little complications start to add up. Unexpected things happen to upend the original plan. There’s lots of action, new worlds to explore, and one-liners to giggle over. You don’t mind the times things seem to go off the main plot thread, though, because those are the most fun and where we learn the most about the characters.

A well-designed spaceship and action sequence from Gunblast Girls #1 by Crisse

I love a good sci-fi space fantasy/opera/western. This book is right up my alley. It mixes the norms of the American West in the 19th century with a beautifully designed future on another planet. There are still trains and brothels and bars and casinos, of course, but they all have better tech, laser guns, and space ships parked outside.

Crisse is a fantastic artist. Everything in this book is well-designed. The ships are great to look at and the characters are a bundle of energy and movement. They’re not afraid to be “cartoony” and bend at odd angles or have the camera show them to the reader at extreme angles. It’s all perfectly legible on the page, and a ton of fun to look at.

He sticks to a four tier page of panels with no detail every getting left behind. There are no shortcuts in this book. He draws every screw on every ship, and a background in every panel (that’s not such a tight closeup that you wouldn’t see it anyway).

He varies up the page layouts. There are no simple 9 panel grids. He’ll inset panels as easily as he’s stack them one on top of the other on the same tier, if it works for what he’s trying to go. It’s never confusingly complicated. Every page should be looked at more than once to get verything out of it.

So why am I so wary to recommend it?

The Gunblast Girls

Crisse’s cast is a diverse representation of powerful women.

The lead character is a black woman with enormous breasts whose nipples protrude through any clothing. The second character we meet is an Asian woman with enormous breasts whose nipples always point forward. They’re joined by a strong and curvy Latina character with big boobs and shadow-creating nipples. The cast is rounded out by Gretchen, identity politics unknown, but always wearing a skimpy white sleeveless shirt that creates sideboob from her large boobs with the occasionally pointy nipple.

The biggest target for jokes in Gunblast Girls are the ones on their chests

Crisse isn’t hiding it or soft-pedaling it, though. It’s a point that various characters make throughout the book. (See the panel samples in this section of the review.)

It gets to the crux of the problem I have with the book. I see what it’s trying to do. It’s very Danger Girls-esque in this way. There’s a winking nod at self-awareness and a bit of self-parody at the same time. It’s Crisse having fun drawing what he likes to draw, but being sure to let the reader know that he knows what he’s doing. It’s a fun romp of a book that over-exaggerates certain features to either poke fun at them or to acknowledge that the format requires them.

But it fails and becomes more embarrassing than humorous. It also never stops. It’s so constantly in your face that it wears out its welcome.

The biggest target for jokes in Gunblast Girls are the ones on their chests

The even bigger problem is that the book often falls flat in the dialogue. A book like this needs better dialogue to sell this. There are a lot of bad catchphrase creation attempts in this book, or borrowing from certain well-known catchphrases. It just doesn’t work for me.

It’s a book that knows what it wants to be but has to walk a fine line and fails. I think if you could bring in a writer to punch the script up and make it feel like something that isn’t try so hard, they might be able to do something with this book that would make it feel more natural.

There’s a great camaraderie amongst the women in the ship, and they constantly snipe at each other the way friends who are comfortable with each other might feel free to. That’s obvious in the book, but it goes a little too far in places and hits a couple of sour notes along the way. (There are even one or two racial characteristic references that they might want to think twice about in 2022.)

Otherwise, it starts to feel like a prurient and juvenile book aimed at teenagers who haven’t discovered everything the internet has to offer them yet, instead.

It’s unfortunate because this book would otherwise be right up my alley. It has strong art, a fun sci-fi/space opera adventure story, and a sense of humor.

Back of the Book

Sketchbook sample from Crisse's Gunblast Girls v1

The book ends with an eight-page sketchbook section. It’s filled with Crisse’s pencil work for the series — everything from cover roughs to character designs and memorable panels in progress.

We also find out here that the original title for the book was “Galactic Sistas.” I think he did the right thing by going with “Gunblast Girls.”

It’s a short, but nice look at some of the uncolored and uninked art from the book. Crisse is a very tight penciler, so some of the pictures might look like finalized panels, themselves.

From a style point of view, I think you’d like this book if you enjoy either J. Scott Campbell’s work, or Alessandro Barbucci’s “Ekho” work. It’s in that range.

Recommended?

Gunblast Girls v1 cover

Not exactly. If you can get past the script and just want to enjoy the world building and the art style without being bothered by its, uhm, excesses, it’s a fun little romp. There’s just one too many hurdles in the way.

This book ends in a cliffhanger. The good news is that the second volume finally came. It took about four years, but it’s here now and I plan on reading it next. I’ll let you know if things got better in that one. (If not, I probably just won’t review it.)

Buy It Now


Gunblast Girls v1: "In Your Face, Loser!" - PIPELINE COMICS

It's a sci-fi action romp featuring a gang of women coming back together for a big heist-like job. But there's a big problem...

URL: https://amzn.to/3Q7CJKc

Author: Crisse

Editor's Rating:
2

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One Comment

  1. You perfectly encapsulated here the reasons why I never liked the art of Crisse, I didn’t like Tellos for the same. On top of that, the fratboy-level humour and dialogue (I mean locker room talk lol) are equally off-putting as they are in things like Lanfeust. Younger demographic. It’s not really for us, we’re too old for this 😉
    The only quality I used to grant Brian Michael Bendis is a certain mastery of natural-sounding dialogue, we don’t have anything like that in french BD, I mean, you reviewed Largo Winch recently, it’s been like that here for 75 years, sub-par pulp pretending to be literature. Except for Edgar P. Jacobs who is still unsurpassed tot this day. Even Goscinny fell prey to that in his earlier series.
    Then again, kids these days believe that Rap is poetry, so what do I know…