And thus ends my Queen & Country reread! I remember being disappointed by the final volume when I first read it, and I’m glad that it held up better this time around. I also appreciated some of the technical details that came up in the supplemental materials. There is so much that goes into comics that I just don’t notice!

Finishing this up tonight, I appreciated reading through the sample script and other supplementary materials included at the end of the book. I have the horrible habit of consuming media without any technical appreciation for how it is made. I write for a living, so I have some appreciation for what writing fiction must be like, but I have zero understanding of film (or at least very little), and it occurred to me while reading this script that I read a lot of comics without really understanding the creative process there.

As I wrote in my last review of this volume, this really steps things up. It better captures the ugliness and senseless brutality that The Sandbaggers also did—it also liberally cribs from Sandbaggers plot points, but I see it more as loving homage than plagiarism. I still don’t think it’s as good as The Sandbaggers, and the changing art style sometimes bugs me, but I think this might be the peak of the series.

I’ve been revisiting a lot of my comics collection in recent months, and after finally finishing XIII, I thought I’d revisit this series. In fact, I’ve been wanting to reread Queen & Country basically since I first read it. This first volume in particular has seen a lot of revisiting, especially the early pages. That made it hard to appreciate the volume this time around, and it was harder to get through.

I recently came into some Amazon gift cards, so I bought this volume to complete my collection of Queen & Country. I think this is the first time I’ve owned an entire comics series? At least, one of this length. I’m glad I own the whole series, but like the show its based on, I feel like it gets less interesting the longer it goes on. It’s fun to get some peeks into the backstories of the characters who come up in the first two volumes, but it’s just not as interesting as the early stories.

I think this might be my least favorite of the three volumes I now own (need to track down the fourth to complete the collection). The first arc was good enough (and felt straight out of The Sandbaggers—Rucka borrows HEAVILY from a couple of episodes), but the second seemed like supplementary material to Rucka’s novels. I like this series when it’s riffing off of The Sandbaggers, but when it feels like its own thing with lots of continuity, it’s harder to enjoy.

This volume was excellent. Much more of the Sandbaggers vibes and less saving the world spy fiction. I ordered the third volume today!

I’ve been wanting to read this since binging all three series of The Sandbaggers, since I’ve seen it repeatedly referred to as a spiritual sequel. They weren’t kidding—the first story arc feels like a remix of the show! The third story arc was the least interesting to me (and probably the reason this didn’t get full marks). The first two deal with the cynicism of espionage and the brokenness of spies in the way I expected the series would, whereas the third arc felt more like a traditional spy story with maybe some furniture moving for future arcs.