Killing Girl is a five-issue miniseries by Glen Brunswick and Frank Espinosa, which guarantees visual fireworks if nothing else.

Espinosa is an animator who previously worked for the likes of Disney and Warner Brothers before making the transition to comics with his book Rocketo.  His art is undeniably unique.  It's minimal and impressionistic in the extreme.  At times it's not even a case of minimal linework, so much as coloured blobs that just about hang together as a picture. 

Very stylish, as you can imagine, but it also takes a little getting used to.  With some pages, even the division between the panels isn't immediately obvious.  But it's striking stuff, and when it works, it's spectacular.  On the occasions when it doesn't, it's a blur of shapes.

Killing Girl is about Sara, a 19-year-old girl who was kidnapped as a girl and has ended up working her way through the criminal ranks from hooker to Black Widow-style assassin.  The story sees her being forcibly reunited with her largely-forgotten old life when she's sent on an assignment and stumbles upon her sister's fiancé.  Now, I'd have to concede that this is a truly incredible coincidence, but as it's the element that kickstarts the whole story, I can let it slide.

With a plot like that, we're somewhere off in the fringes of noir and exploitation movie.  There are two ways of approaching something like this - you can try for gritty realism, or you can go nuts.  Since Espinosa is on art, the book goes nuts, cheerfully embracing its, shall we say, tangential relationship to the real world.

Even so, I have a nagging feeling that the book wants me to take its protagonist's plight more seriously than I feel able to.  It's terribly silly when you stop to think about it, and it works best played with tongue firmly in cheek.  Espinosa is sufficiently over the top to get away with it; the script may not be.

Visually it's remarkable stuff, even though some scenes threaten to spiral completely out of Espinosa's control.  The writing is fine so far as it goes, but never takes flight in quite the same way.

Rating: B

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