Jennifer Blood #6

NOTE: I'm actually reviewing issues 1-6. Because breaking down the separate issues would be pointless.

Meh.

That's the syllable that comes readily to mouth and mind when trying to appraise the first six issues of Jennifer Blood.

It should be noted, I bought these on a whim, as there was a Garth Ennis sale on Comixology and I was bored at lunch. It was only three dollars. I thought, "Hmm, Jennifer Blood, stay-at-home mom by day, brutal vigilante at night. Should be silly enough to keep my attention." I figured it would be one of those so-called "guilty pleasures."

It was not.

Instead, it turned into sort of an analysis game for me. Try to figure out why it wasn't working. Because, as a story, Jennifer Blood is broken.

I'll refrain from discussing any major plot developments (such as they are), as there are so few that to do so would essentially nullify what tiny, minuscule amount of suspense you might be able to eek out of the series. What I will do is break down the basic structure that was present in each issue:

Jen is a stay at home mom. We see her doing dull, uninteresting things with her family, exchanging hokey, laborious dialogue with the non-characters that are her family. None of this is important. It completely doesn't matter. It has nothing to do with the plot.

Jennifer Blood, however, is a kick-ass, leather-clad, battle-vixen with a truly sadistic streak. We see her mercilessly butcher person after person after person. She does not fight them, mind you. She just kills them. Each issue is essentially a protracted murder (or mass murder) interspersed with her being "normal" or having flashbacks, all overlaid with her snarky narration.

Character

The narration itself is perhaps one of the greatest drawbacks of the series. It presents the character of Jennifer Blood in a way that makes me wonder if Garth Ennis has ever had a conversation with a woman.

Jennifer Blood is, for all intents and purposes, a male character dropped in a hot woman's body. There's nothing feminine about her. Were you to remove the images from the page and just dealt with the narration itself, the only aspect signaling that you were dealing with a woman would be her passing references to her family life-- cooking, cleaning and having a husband.

But the thing is, the majority of those don't necessarily signal feminine behavior anymore. Plenty of men cook and clean. Some, these days, even have husbands.

She is a character rendered in a very male vision. She doesn't give a shit about "girl stuff." She reads gun magazines. She doesn't look like someone who could actually rack up the body-count she does. She looks like a goddamn super model.

This is the Male Gaze in action!

Narrative

The only interesting/funny/novel thing about Jennifer is the housewife/psychopathic killer dichotomy. But it's only played for laughs. It's a gimmick. Insofar as the the plot is involved, the fact that she has children, a husband and a life beyond fighting crime is virtually unimportant. Adds nothing to the story.

The only overlap of her two lives is a short-lived misunderstanding with her horny and nosey next-door-neighbor.

Aside from weighing the narrative down with unnecessary familial fluff, the story carries next to no tension. As stated earlier, each issue show-cases another murder. Each murder is pulled off flawlessly and without apparent effort.

There is no struggle.

Neither physical, emotional nor moral.

She shows up. She kills people. The End.

And what plot there is, popping its tiny head up now and again amidst all the blood, guts and hit-and-miss jokes, is all delivered through exposition. For the fist four issues or so, that exposition is mostly handled by seeing conversations with the bad guys unfold-- which is strange since the main narrative device throughout is Jennifer's internal monologue and she's not present for those conversations-- or its delivered by Jennifer as she kills one of her marks.

Rather than allowing a variety of scenes to help unfold the plot in a way that we can experience, Ennis uses a few scenes in which his characters are either A) telling you what you need to know to understand what's going on, or B) being butchered by the main character.

And there's certainly no rising action through the story arc (which is completed in the six issues-- the sixth actually says "The End"), and even in the episodic format of a comic book you NEED that. When we finally come to what should be the climax of the arc, it's over before it's even begun. Literally. The biggest, baddest battle to get the biggest, baddest bad guy takes place in between the fifth and sixth issues. We don't see it. We just see Jennifer sitting over him, talking to him, telling him (us) about what's been going on.

No suspense. No tension. No effort.

Meh.