Sometimes you finish a story and just ask.... What? ( )

After volume 4 mostly spent its pages on re-establishing a status quo with some minor adventures and a lot of humour, in this volume, the Plot is back. Which would normally make me very happy, except ... it's full of trippy stuff. I strongly dislike that in nearly all contexts. Dream sequences in novels. Drug-fueled fantasies on television. Near-death hallucinations in movies. When it's played for humour, I find it dumb. When it's played for cutesy, I find it obnoxious. When it's played for high brow symbolism, I find it dull. And when it's played for horror, I find it toothless. (Foreshadowing is the one thing they tend to be good for, but that's not really the case here very much, and even that is usually only cool in hindsight.) They almost always put me off, and this book had a lot of it. Add to that some confusing time travel stuff -- not in itself a bad thing, but when combined with the reality warping, and it was not all that easy to follow. Oh, sure, it more or less made retroactive sense once I finished, but that didn't make the reading experience of getting there any better.

So it's actually fairly high praise that I'm giving this book 3.5 stars in spite of that. That's because the plot, once explained, turned out to secretly have been a fairly powerful one the whole time. It's because the character interactions are (at least nearly) as fun as ever. It's because I deeply appreciate the labour put into making the abandoned plotlines of the end of volume 3 and uncollected 16th issue of the original run jive and make sense with the soft rebooted continuity started in volume 4 without explanation. And it's because this volume has the "Orc Dave" one-shot, following in the steps of volume 3's "Braga" one-shot at being a strong, emotional character origin I didn't know I wanted.

Here's hoping volume six will continue being this plot-oriented, and that we're done with the trippy stuff. Please. ( )

I wish this series could go back to being as strong as the first two TPs. I liked it well enough when I understood what was going on (the trippy sequences towards the beginning were fabulous!), but it got twisty enough that I lost interest. Gotta say...I'm losing my interest in the Queens, which makes me very, very sad. ( )

Wiebe does his own version of Crisis on Infinite Earths to try to clean up the mess he left at the end of his first Rat Queens series. And he just makes everything worse. So much worse.

He might be better off if he stuck to shorter and more humorous stories and stopped trying to make this an epic adventure series.

Or maybe after the next volume, he could just let the letterer take over writing the book so he can go start a Saga knock-off?!?! ( )

Jag undrar om inte syftet med Rat Queens är att ständigt bli allt mer utflippat. Volym fem, The colossal magic nothing, fortsätter ungefär där volym fyra slutade (efter en kort historia om orc-Dave) med nya, underliga äventyr med psykedeliska jättepaddor och en teckningsstil som härmar 70-tals-tecknat som låtsades vara för barn, och sedan med skumma hipsterkockar och underliga svampar. Sedan dyker det upp en konstig blå trollkarl i gult och lila, och så verkar plötsligt Violet vara borta och glömd av alla utom Betty.

Sedan är vi helt plötsligt en tjugo år in i en alternativ framtid, Violet, Dee och Betty möts upp för att undersöka märkliga händelser i utkanten av Violets landområden, och sedan blir det ännu underligare.

Även om stilen blir allt bättre, med underliga minnessekvenser och annat gjorda i helt annan teknik, och historien kanske inte är helt obegriplig när man tar den i sin helhet, så tvekar jag aningen om Rat Queens egentligen har något att säga, eller om historien bara kommer fortsätta undergräva vad som precis sagts och presentera nya sanningar. Sådant är svårt att orka med i längden. ( )