Fight Girls #4 // Review
The ten contenders for the New Queen of the Gilmoran Empire have been reduced to two. Tora Winter, the dark-haired contender with a shock of white from Rose City in Sevendor, squares-off against Xandra Blackwater: the eye-patched redhead from the deep mine of Helgrave. Writer/artist Frank Cho pits the two contenders against each other in one final competition in the penultimate issue of Fight Girls. Colorist Sabine Rich once again provides depth to the action as. the two contenders engage in one-on-one combat. A quarter of the issue is direct intrigue. The rest is all hand-to-hand combat between two women. There’s primal energy here.
A couple of men engage in a fight on the east end of Sector 5 in Deep Mine. One of them is investigating matters on the mystery of Xandra Blackwater. It doesn’t seem like an even fight until a third gentleman shows up. A trigger is pulled. The narrative switched to the final of five trials for the crown of the Gilmoran Empire. Blackwater is up against Winter. It’s not going to be an easy task for either one of them. The two battle without weapons on a single plan of white as an audience looks on.
Cho opens the issue with three pages of cloak-and-dagger. It’s an interesting contrast to previous issues, which have all opened with the contest of the month. The political entanglement near issue’s end is a nice bit of punctuation on the action as well. With the vast majority of the issue focusing on a single match between two characters, Cho is really running the risk of constructing a remarkably dull plot. Still, there’s more than enough detail in the course of the issue to keep the fight interesting from beginning to end.
The fact that Cho is also doing the art doesn’t hurt matters. He knows exactly how to orchestrate the action...pushing it percussively across the page in a visually interesting way. The action might feel a bit stiff in places, but it’s never boring...which is saying a lot of an issue-length fight scene between to woman wearing almost identical outfits. Rich’s colors are beautiful. She does an outstanding job of the subtlety between the redheaded skin tone of Blackwater and the darker, tanned complexion of Winter. Her work even shows a careful consideration of the precise location of the light sources in the arena as they highlight the two combatant’s bodies.
Cho and Rich’s work has been a really primal exploration thus far. As anticipated, the final issue appears to be a big wrap-up after the final competition. All that cloak-and-dagger drama in and around the edges of everything will likely form the center of everything. The central focus of the series is now completely out of the way. The series has been so very dedicated to the competition that it will be interesting to see an entire chapter focussed on political intrigue.
