📚 bookblog: ❤️❤️❤️🖤🖤 for Queen & Country Definitive Edition, Volume 04, by Greg Rucka

- kudos:

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.

📚 bookblog: ❤️❤️🖤🖤🖤 for The Life and Mysterious Death of Ian Mackintosh: The Inside Story of The Sandbaggers and Television's Top Spy, by Robert G. Folsom

- kudos:

I’ve been hungering to read this book for months! I watched all three series of The Sandbaggers early in 2023 and have been trying to read and watch everything I can on the series. This includes a couple of YouTube video essays, most of Greg Rucka’s Queen & Country, and whatever else I could find. A relative gifted me this book for Christmas, and I was very excited! I’d known about it for a while but couldn’t find it through public or academic libraries.

📚 bookblog: ❤️❤️❤️❤️🖤 for Queen & Country Definitive Edition, Volume 03, by Greg Rucka

- kudos:

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.

📚 bookblog: ❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️ for Queen & Country Definitive Edition: Volume 02, by Greg Rucka

- kudos:

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

📚 bookblog: ❤️❤️❤️❤️🖤 for Queen & Country Definitive Edition: Volume 01, by Greg Rucka

- kudos:

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.