Fight Girls #3 // Review
The contest to find out who will be the queen of everything continues in writer/artist Frank Cho’s Fight Girls #3. Sabine Rich’s vibrant color adds considerably to an aquatic challenge for the women who would be queen. The five-part series reaches its halfway point in a vicious issue that finds the hopefuls up against a deceptively simple-looking task: swim one mile out to the platform and signal the transporter to take them to an airborne studio. It just wouldn’t be a Fight Girls issue if this was a simple matter of swimming to the goal. Danger lurks around everywhere in the depths of the water.
The floating capital city rests over the ocean...directly above it in Challenge Three. Ten contestants have been narrowed to five. Xandra Blackwater of Hellgrave is favored to do well in the challenge as she has done strikingly well into the previous two. Going into the challenge, the one hopeful with the greatest advantage has to be #10: Pondo Shen of Lunar Base 2. She’d represented Lunar Base 2 in swimming at last year’s Empire Games. The ocean is filled with the kind of predators that could make Challenge Three deadly for anyone, though.
Once again, Cho focusses the bulk of the issue on the twists and turns of fortune for the contestants through a surprisingly eventful single challenge. There’s a little bit of intrigue on the other side of the challenge that involves a cloak-and-dagger mystery that feels a lot more compelling in the third issue than it had in any of the previous issues. Had there been a bit more of a backstory on ANY of the characters, the story might have been a bit more compelling, but Cho chooses to focus the drama on the actual events and the dangers that the contestants face.
Cho’s art beautifully moves into the water in the third issue. Given Cho’s strengths as an artist, there might have been the tendency to want to sex-up the appeal of the contest this issue, but Cho chooses to focus on the beauty and the appeal of sheer survival. The predators don’t always move around on the page in a way that feels natural, but the action is dynamic enough to keep the momentum of the contest moving from page to page. Rich’s colors are gorgeous...lending a hell of a lot of depth onto the faces of the contestants and the beautiful range of blues in the water. It’s subtle, but the third issue might be Rich’s best yet for color.
As the series progresses, it’s apparent that. Cho is lining things up for an essentially political cloak-and-dagger wrap-up in the fifth issue. The pacing has been maintained in a way that’s come really, really close to being repetitious, but Cho has done a really, really good job of keeping it interesting throughout. So much of the appeal in the series has proven to be the repetition. Rarely has a sport-like series worked this well while keeping so close to the game-by-game nature of an athletic competition motif.
