Bucharest, Romania. There’s a girl cowering on a bare mattress in a largely empty room. The windows are boarded up. A guy walks in and tells her that fear won’t save her. He says he knows that she’s scared. “It’s okay. You’re a child.” he says. “Children are scared easily.” He happens to be holding an assault rifle as he says this. It’s a very dark world in The Dead Lucky #7. Writer Melissa Flores continues her sci-fi drama with artist French Carlomagno and colorist Mattia Iacono. It’s a delicate combination of action and horror that trudges through the darkness for another issue.

Dead Lucky has been sent to Romania to save a girl. What had been largely a project for San Francisco has turned into something much larger. DL doesn’t mind going to Romania. Other people have to answer for that. She only has to do the work. And it’s not like saving some girl’s life on the other side of the planet isn’t a good idea. It’s just a little weird when the Department of Defense wants her to go to Jordan to extract a scientist who was defecting to the U.S. The woman handing her the assignment doesn’t want her to go. DL isn’t entirely certain that she has a choice.

Flores has a very slick composition on the issue. Opening action is followed by drama: the next assignment. The Dead Lucky team deploys and gets several pages into Jordan before the cliffhanger ending. It’s kind of a cliche format for a squad-based action comic, but it works really well. An opening punch. Then, a conversation before a closing kick. It all fits together quite well, and there’s a solid connection with the hero as she deals with personal issues between deployments. It’s been a fun series so far. It could go a long way with this format. 

Carlomagno deftly slings the action across the page with a clever style that is amplified and granted a certain amount of mood and radiance by Iacono. DL feels like a classic hero with a cool design, sliding through aggression that explodes around her. DL’s energy signature feels dazzlingly radiant in an exceedingly fun couple of combat sequences. The darkness of DL’s life out of the mask slowly sprawls out between the pages. She’s a hero, but this IS also a job for her. The mixture of work and heroism with just a little bit of interpersonal drama feels like a nice balance.

DL has come a long way in only seven issues. Flores’s overall pacing feels like it might be moving a bit too quickly, but only because she’s gone from San Francisco to Jordan in...seven issues. There’s nothing structurally wrong with Flores’s pacing over the course of the entire run of the series...but there IS some concern that maybe she might be painting herself into a corner in the long run if things get international as quickly as they have. At this rate, she’s going to be fighting aliens on the other side of the galaxy by the end of the year.

Grade: B+