prinCZess
Warrior, Writer, Performer, Perv
Chapter I: Feeding Trouble
We open with a gunfight.
Of some note here because it is the first for a long-running trend in the series, is just how detailed the handgun is--to the point where its pretty easy to identify as a Glock. Suffice to say there's a great deal of gun-porn in the entire work...And some of the less firearm-related variety. But we might get to that eventually.
A lady sporting some rockin’ late-80s hair has downed a pair of police officers and gets into a gunfight with a third man they were protecting. The man escapes, and our villainess calls someone to let them know he got away as she unloads a revolver she oddly never actually used in the fight and loads the empty cases into the officers own service revolvers*. A panel zooms in on the ‘Chicago Police’ emblem on the side of one of the downed officer’s uniforms.
*A subnote below the panel details that the revolver(s) are 6-inch Smith & Wesson Model 19s, and the cartridges are +P Black Talons—a bit of gun trivia that kind of dates things now, really, as Black Talons were a style of hollowpoint round used that, after some controversy for supposedly being super-deadly (don’t think anything ever supported such), got pulled from shelves and eventually rebranded/redesigned. So it’s a curious time-capsule moment of a 90s gun item.
We move to a suburban home that is rather reminiscent of a bunker more than anything, all square angles and recessed windows…I love it and want to retire there. Inside this house, we are treated to more gunfire. This time, however, it comes from our also late-80s rocker-hair sporting heroine as she blazes away at a set of targets and punches holes in or near the bullseye with a broad array of handguns—A P08 Luger and P38 identifiable along with what I believe is a compensated 1911 of some kind and what might be some style of Beretta (bottom-left, center)? There’s a variety, I think is the point.
Another girl shows up and engages in some playful breast-fondling to mock the fact that the shooter might just be a little turned-on…Or maybe it’s just cold in the bomb-shelter’s basement. Yeah. That's gotta be it.
And once again, note how detailed the firearms are--up to the banner on the frontmost pistol of the top panel where the 'Walther' emblem would/should be, to Geco-branding on the underside of spent cartridges. In a similar vein, the panels before this show Rally in safety glasses and earmuffs (which can still be somewhat seen in the bottom-left here after she's removed them) as she shoots--the comic tends to be particular about showing firearms usage fairly accurately from a safety standpoint (when not going full-throttle on the action movie cliches, at least)--and it's just always struck me as odd that a Japanese guy where firearms ownership is virtually forbidden entirely can present it with degrees of accuracy when the US entertainment industry and broader media so very, very often don't (one particularly amusing one in the context of the above is a couple of instances of bullets being presented inside their cartridge after supposedly being 'shot'--such as here. It's some silly stuff.
Our heroines, everybody!
Over the pair’s breakfast, we’re introduced to ‘Minnie-May Hopkins’—who’s enough of a bomb-freak to use grenades that are (presumably) disabled as condiment-dishes (eat your heart out Martha Stewart!)—and ‘Rally Vincent’*, the one who was doing all the shooting. Rally, it turns out, is a gunsmith, but what really makes her the money is bounty hunting** and she’s going after some bailjumper today. May wants to come along, to Rally’s greatly begrudging acceptance since she'd prefer the other girl stay and watch the store, and we’re introduced to the third main-character of the series.
*Apparently, due to the issues in translating ‘L’ and ‘R’ from Japanese to English, this name was supposed to be straight-up ‘Larry’. I prefer it this way, though--and so did the creator. So, as I understand it, the English translation-error became the 'proper' version.
**Illinois, if anyone is curious, has barred bounty hunting since the 1960s. But, then, they and Chicago have also made firearms-ownership a difficulty, especially in the 90s this series is based in. But it’s the Quentin Tarantino 90s…As we’ll discover in a moment with Rally’s car.
To complete the tomboy trifecta of compensation by wearing ties (and power-suits), shooting guns, and cars, Rally drives a '67 Shelby GT500 (license plate #BRD529 in an homage to the Blues Brothers). Which is worth a LOT more than any kind of money she could make bounty-hunting or gunsmithing. Where’d she get it? Never explained. How can she afford it? With great difficulty. Does it really make realistic sense? Nope. But is it cool? Oh hell yes, and it sometimes functions as a character in its own right. Based on some future plot and character-development stuff, I like to head-canon it as something she inherited.
Rally, May, and Carrol Shelby’s gift to vehicle design, art and humanity, make their way to the scene of the shooting that started our adventure and exchange friendly banter with the cops on the scene as well as a slightly shifty-seeming lawyer. May, to Rally’s chagrin, introduces herself as Rally’s business partner.
This gives me a chance to show an example of the humor in this whole series I also kind've appreciate. When it's not Looney Tunes situational comedy and ridiculousness, there's a good deal of this comedic beat-and-reaction imagery throughout where something is said or done and the characters react in a much more typically cartoon style--this one's even somewhat understated, as I recall there being a number where there's two or three panels for a delivery, a visible pause, and then the punchline/reaction to get shown. It's just fun.
We're also reminded once again it's the 90s, because everybody is sporting wide-frame aviator Ray-Bans.
Turns out Dodge—the man getting shot at in the opening—was a pretty notable coke-dealer that was turning state’s evidence. He was also, Rally literally sniffs out by gunpowder and oil, keeping a whole closet full of guns in his police-protected safe-house with him. Uhh...Oops for Chicago's PD, I suppose? It isn’t relevant to much, but it does let Rally further lay on the gun-love.
Rally: “Gun oil and gunpowder. My favorite fragrances.”
Our heroine apparently loves the smell of gunpowder in the morning. It smells like...a case she can charge for! There may be a dangerous drug-dealer on the loose, but have no fear, Chicago, Rally and May are on the case! For ten-thousand dollars plus expenses…I am pretty sure this isn’t how bounty-hunting works…But as mentioned, this is Quentin Tarantino’s Chicago.
Rally returns to her shop to get more than just her pistol and snazzy two-piece suit to actually start tracking Dodge down, worried because she believes (correctly) there was a pro hitman going after the guy (based on where shots had landed and an also-correct guess that the hitman had put spent cartridges into the cops revolvers to throw off the early investigation). Just as they arrive back at her shop, however, a trio of mob-men show up behind them, looking to make sure Rally is injured badly enough not to pursue the case (as killing her would be too mean).
Hurray for honor among...mafia enforcers?
In the first really big reflection of the ‘Looney Tunes’ situation stuff mentioned earlier, after a flash-grande from May, Rally blasts one of the mooks, but in his dying moments he grabs onto her pants. One of his partners rounding on her with a pump shotgun and rigor mortis apparently setting in instantaneously in this universe, she has only one option—and that is to take her pants off.
Because of course she does.
Things go from bad to worse as shotgun-boy gets ahold of Minnie-May, forcing Rally to surrender—pantsless and all.
Or, that is, ‘surrender’ so that she can walk close enough to him to use a pop-out piddly-dink .25 Auto pistol that’s stuck up her sleeve to shoot off the guy’s thumb and make him drop the shotgun. I dunnow if that’s a proportionate response to a pantsing, but I suppose it is to an attempted murder. This begins a rather long and steady tradition Rally will make of using the sleeve-concealed .25 as an ace-in-the hole as well as another of shooting thumbs off of assholes to keep them from shooting (or, in other cases, shooting the hammer off of their weapon). Why does she do the latter? Because shooting the gun out of their hands would obviously be unrealistic, that's why! Shooting off thumbs and shit at distance is much more believable, right? Right?
Anyhow...
Changed into a snazzy new skirt, in the next scene Rally interrogates the remaining mob mook who's in the condition to answer questions instead of screaming about his lack of thumb or...heartbeat, I suppose. Somehow, the final made man is all confidence and bravado and ‘ha, you lost your pants and got great legs’…Which is kind’ve a compliment, really. Rally is unamused by this coming from mafia-boy who was trying to seriously injure her moments before, and uses a handy revolver to try out her own variation on Russian Roulette to make him talk.
Rally is good enough to feel out which chamber a cartridge is in...At least, most of the time.
Rally: "My record so far is twelve straight. Perhaps you'd care to help me try and break it?"
He talks.
Ignoring May’s protests she wants to help and leaving the other girl behind this time, Rally hares off to the docks where the mob thinks Dodge is holed up. While in the middle of staring at the photo of him & his wife the lawyer gave her and wondering how she’s going to find him, some Chicago punk tries to carjack her (understandably, I suppose, when she’s driving what she is).
The Chicago punk carjacking her is none other than Dodge! How convenient! And semi-awkward. You’d think Dodge would have gone for a vehicle more fitting to his namesake!
Good news. There’s no charge for my bad jokes! Lucky you.
Before too much celebration can be had, Rally and Dodge are set-upon by the rocker-hair assassin from the beginning of things and held at the very large gunpoint of a Desert Eagle as she demands they hand over their guns. It seems ‘Bonnie’ isn’t after the Dodge character to kill him, though, she wants him to tell her where he hid a bunch of coke he stashed before turning state’s evidence—and she’s willing to threaten Dodge’s wife by way of revealing she knows where the woman is hiding. Villainy status firmly established (just in case the whole 'blasting away at cops' thing in the opening was too subtle).
Rally flips the tables by flipping her pistol around as she hands it over, and repeats her earlier ‘blow off the thumb’ trick and drives away. Bonnie goes from composed, ice-cold assassin making threats to very very angry assassin screaming profanities nd a car-chase ensues where Rally is minorly distracted by how much she loves the way the Deagle sounds shooting at her.
I regret to inform you that our heroine might have a bit of a fixation.
I am both relieved and slightly disappointed the translators didn't go for the low-hanging fruit of 'They'll surround us if we don't rip ass!' here...But, then, I have a juvenile sense of humor.
This is also the first image I have of Rally's GT500, so...Say hello everybody. Isn't it pretty? It's also the beginning of something of a trend of car chases in Gunsmith Cats, and most of them tend to be very fun to read.
Using a handy cellphone/CB mounted in the GT500, Rally coordinates a plan with May. A plan that culminates in a grenade being tossed underneath Bonnie’s car as it pursues the GT500 and explodes, sending Bonnie's car careening into a lamp-post in a mangled heap of steel. In celebration, Rally engages in her own vengeful round of mock breast-fondling of May and notes that the girl is turned on by the explosion.
We end with Rally working on something using an old-school screw gun in the most 90s shorts-and-tennis-shoes outfit in existence as she explains how Bonnie and the lawyer were working together-and Bonnie actually survived the crash, albeit with pretty major injuries. But Rally got the money she was promised plus her auto repairs covered, so everything’s happy for the:
Thus ends the first issue.
There's one big instance of 'early installment weirdness' worth noting here in conclusion. The 'sexually excited by gunfire' aspect for Rally largely disappears in subsequent issues (though, somewhat to the detriment of the storyline and many other things, May's thing with explosives doesn't disappear and instead gets kind've built upon...But that's a complaint for the future), and what it gets replaced by to explain her prediliction for firearms is a vastly superior substitute in terms of storytelling.
This first installment gets a 9mm out of 10mm for solid gunfighty action and fun character-establishment for Rally Vincent, bounty hunter.
On the Quentin Tarantino scale of oddball shit that is included, it rates a very low 1 Tarantino out of 5. Very average fare, really, with only the allusions to sexual thrill from gunfire/explosions making it rate at all on this index.
The Tarantino scale will peak at a number of times during the series, though. So the prospective reader should be prepared. But maybe that will be revealed more in the next issue...Revolver Freak.
We open with a gunfight.
Of some note here because it is the first for a long-running trend in the series, is just how detailed the handgun is--to the point where its pretty easy to identify as a Glock. Suffice to say there's a great deal of gun-porn in the entire work...And some of the less firearm-related variety. But we might get to that eventually.
A lady sporting some rockin’ late-80s hair has downed a pair of police officers and gets into a gunfight with a third man they were protecting. The man escapes, and our villainess calls someone to let them know he got away as she unloads a revolver she oddly never actually used in the fight and loads the empty cases into the officers own service revolvers*. A panel zooms in on the ‘Chicago Police’ emblem on the side of one of the downed officer’s uniforms.
*A subnote below the panel details that the revolver(s) are 6-inch Smith & Wesson Model 19s, and the cartridges are +P Black Talons—a bit of gun trivia that kind of dates things now, really, as Black Talons were a style of hollowpoint round used that, after some controversy for supposedly being super-deadly (don’t think anything ever supported such), got pulled from shelves and eventually rebranded/redesigned. So it’s a curious time-capsule moment of a 90s gun item.
We move to a suburban home that is rather reminiscent of a bunker more than anything, all square angles and recessed windows…I love it and want to retire there. Inside this house, we are treated to more gunfire. This time, however, it comes from our also late-80s rocker-hair sporting heroine as she blazes away at a set of targets and punches holes in or near the bullseye with a broad array of handguns—A P08 Luger and P38 identifiable along with what I believe is a compensated 1911 of some kind and what might be some style of Beretta (bottom-left, center)? There’s a variety, I think is the point.
Another girl shows up and engages in some playful breast-fondling to mock the fact that the shooter might just be a little turned-on…Or maybe it’s just cold in the bomb-shelter’s basement. Yeah. That's gotta be it.
And once again, note how detailed the firearms are--up to the banner on the frontmost pistol of the top panel where the 'Walther' emblem would/should be, to Geco-branding on the underside of spent cartridges. In a similar vein, the panels before this show Rally in safety glasses and earmuffs (which can still be somewhat seen in the bottom-left here after she's removed them) as she shoots--the comic tends to be particular about showing firearms usage fairly accurately from a safety standpoint (when not going full-throttle on the action movie cliches, at least)--and it's just always struck me as odd that a Japanese guy where firearms ownership is virtually forbidden entirely can present it with degrees of accuracy when the US entertainment industry and broader media so very, very often don't (one particularly amusing one in the context of the above is a couple of instances of bullets being presented inside their cartridge after supposedly being 'shot'--such as here. It's some silly stuff.
Our heroines, everybody!
Over the pair’s breakfast, we’re introduced to ‘Minnie-May Hopkins’—who’s enough of a bomb-freak to use grenades that are (presumably) disabled as condiment-dishes (eat your heart out Martha Stewart!)—and ‘Rally Vincent’*, the one who was doing all the shooting. Rally, it turns out, is a gunsmith, but what really makes her the money is bounty hunting** and she’s going after some bailjumper today. May wants to come along, to Rally’s greatly begrudging acceptance since she'd prefer the other girl stay and watch the store, and we’re introduced to the third main-character of the series.
*Apparently, due to the issues in translating ‘L’ and ‘R’ from Japanese to English, this name was supposed to be straight-up ‘Larry’. I prefer it this way, though--and so did the creator. So, as I understand it, the English translation-error became the 'proper' version.
**Illinois, if anyone is curious, has barred bounty hunting since the 1960s. But, then, they and Chicago have also made firearms-ownership a difficulty, especially in the 90s this series is based in. But it’s the Quentin Tarantino 90s…As we’ll discover in a moment with Rally’s car.
To complete the tomboy trifecta of compensation by wearing ties (and power-suits), shooting guns, and cars, Rally drives a '67 Shelby GT500 (license plate #BRD529 in an homage to the Blues Brothers). Which is worth a LOT more than any kind of money she could make bounty-hunting or gunsmithing. Where’d she get it? Never explained. How can she afford it? With great difficulty. Does it really make realistic sense? Nope. But is it cool? Oh hell yes, and it sometimes functions as a character in its own right. Based on some future plot and character-development stuff, I like to head-canon it as something she inherited.
Rally, May, and Carrol Shelby’s gift to vehicle design, art and humanity, make their way to the scene of the shooting that started our adventure and exchange friendly banter with the cops on the scene as well as a slightly shifty-seeming lawyer. May, to Rally’s chagrin, introduces herself as Rally’s business partner.
This gives me a chance to show an example of the humor in this whole series I also kind've appreciate. When it's not Looney Tunes situational comedy and ridiculousness, there's a good deal of this comedic beat-and-reaction imagery throughout where something is said or done and the characters react in a much more typically cartoon style--this one's even somewhat understated, as I recall there being a number where there's two or three panels for a delivery, a visible pause, and then the punchline/reaction to get shown. It's just fun.
We're also reminded once again it's the 90s, because everybody is sporting wide-frame aviator Ray-Bans.
Turns out Dodge—the man getting shot at in the opening—was a pretty notable coke-dealer that was turning state’s evidence. He was also, Rally literally sniffs out by gunpowder and oil, keeping a whole closet full of guns in his police-protected safe-house with him. Uhh...Oops for Chicago's PD, I suppose? It isn’t relevant to much, but it does let Rally further lay on the gun-love.
Rally: “Gun oil and gunpowder. My favorite fragrances.”
Our heroine apparently loves the smell of gunpowder in the morning. It smells like...a case she can charge for! There may be a dangerous drug-dealer on the loose, but have no fear, Chicago, Rally and May are on the case! For ten-thousand dollars plus expenses…I am pretty sure this isn’t how bounty-hunting works…But as mentioned, this is Quentin Tarantino’s Chicago.
Rally returns to her shop to get more than just her pistol and snazzy two-piece suit to actually start tracking Dodge down, worried because she believes (correctly) there was a pro hitman going after the guy (based on where shots had landed and an also-correct guess that the hitman had put spent cartridges into the cops revolvers to throw off the early investigation). Just as they arrive back at her shop, however, a trio of mob-men show up behind them, looking to make sure Rally is injured badly enough not to pursue the case (as killing her would be too mean).
Hurray for honor among...mafia enforcers?
In the first really big reflection of the ‘Looney Tunes’ situation stuff mentioned earlier, after a flash-grande from May, Rally blasts one of the mooks, but in his dying moments he grabs onto her pants. One of his partners rounding on her with a pump shotgun and rigor mortis apparently setting in instantaneously in this universe, she has only one option—and that is to take her pants off.
Because of course she does.
Things go from bad to worse as shotgun-boy gets ahold of Minnie-May, forcing Rally to surrender—pantsless and all.
Or, that is, ‘surrender’ so that she can walk close enough to him to use a pop-out piddly-dink .25 Auto pistol that’s stuck up her sleeve to shoot off the guy’s thumb and make him drop the shotgun. I dunnow if that’s a proportionate response to a pantsing, but I suppose it is to an attempted murder. This begins a rather long and steady tradition Rally will make of using the sleeve-concealed .25 as an ace-in-the hole as well as another of shooting thumbs off of assholes to keep them from shooting (or, in other cases, shooting the hammer off of their weapon). Why does she do the latter? Because shooting the gun out of their hands would obviously be unrealistic, that's why! Shooting off thumbs and shit at distance is much more believable, right? Right?
Anyhow...
Changed into a snazzy new skirt, in the next scene Rally interrogates the remaining mob mook who's in the condition to answer questions instead of screaming about his lack of thumb or...heartbeat, I suppose. Somehow, the final made man is all confidence and bravado and ‘ha, you lost your pants and got great legs’…Which is kind’ve a compliment, really. Rally is unamused by this coming from mafia-boy who was trying to seriously injure her moments before, and uses a handy revolver to try out her own variation on Russian Roulette to make him talk.
Rally is good enough to feel out which chamber a cartridge is in...At least, most of the time.
Rally: "My record so far is twelve straight. Perhaps you'd care to help me try and break it?"
He talks.
Ignoring May’s protests she wants to help and leaving the other girl behind this time, Rally hares off to the docks where the mob thinks Dodge is holed up. While in the middle of staring at the photo of him & his wife the lawyer gave her and wondering how she’s going to find him, some Chicago punk tries to carjack her (understandably, I suppose, when she’s driving what she is).
The Chicago punk carjacking her is none other than Dodge! How convenient! And semi-awkward. You’d think Dodge would have gone for a vehicle more fitting to his namesake!
Good news. There’s no charge for my bad jokes! Lucky you.
Before too much celebration can be had, Rally and Dodge are set-upon by the rocker-hair assassin from the beginning of things and held at the very large gunpoint of a Desert Eagle as she demands they hand over their guns. It seems ‘Bonnie’ isn’t after the Dodge character to kill him, though, she wants him to tell her where he hid a bunch of coke he stashed before turning state’s evidence—and she’s willing to threaten Dodge’s wife by way of revealing she knows where the woman is hiding. Villainy status firmly established (just in case the whole 'blasting away at cops' thing in the opening was too subtle).
Rally flips the tables by flipping her pistol around as she hands it over, and repeats her earlier ‘blow off the thumb’ trick and drives away. Bonnie goes from composed, ice-cold assassin making threats to very very angry assassin screaming profanities nd a car-chase ensues where Rally is minorly distracted by how much she loves the way the Deagle sounds shooting at her.
I regret to inform you that our heroine might have a bit of a fixation.
I am both relieved and slightly disappointed the translators didn't go for the low-hanging fruit of 'They'll surround us if we don't rip ass!' here...But, then, I have a juvenile sense of humor.
This is also the first image I have of Rally's GT500, so...Say hello everybody. Isn't it pretty? It's also the beginning of something of a trend of car chases in Gunsmith Cats, and most of them tend to be very fun to read.
Using a handy cellphone/CB mounted in the GT500, Rally coordinates a plan with May. A plan that culminates in a grenade being tossed underneath Bonnie’s car as it pursues the GT500 and explodes, sending Bonnie's car careening into a lamp-post in a mangled heap of steel. In celebration, Rally engages in her own vengeful round of mock breast-fondling of May and notes that the girl is turned on by the explosion.
We end with Rally working on something using an old-school screw gun in the most 90s shorts-and-tennis-shoes outfit in existence as she explains how Bonnie and the lawyer were working together-and Bonnie actually survived the crash, albeit with pretty major injuries. But Rally got the money she was promised plus her auto repairs covered, so everything’s happy for the:
Thus ends the first issue.
There's one big instance of 'early installment weirdness' worth noting here in conclusion. The 'sexually excited by gunfire' aspect for Rally largely disappears in subsequent issues (though, somewhat to the detriment of the storyline and many other things, May's thing with explosives doesn't disappear and instead gets kind've built upon...But that's a complaint for the future), and what it gets replaced by to explain her prediliction for firearms is a vastly superior substitute in terms of storytelling.
This first installment gets a 9mm out of 10mm for solid gunfighty action and fun character-establishment for Rally Vincent, bounty hunter.
On the Quentin Tarantino scale of oddball shit that is included, it rates a very low 1 Tarantino out of 5. Very average fare, really, with only the allusions to sexual thrill from gunfire/explosions making it rate at all on this index.
The Tarantino scale will peak at a number of times during the series, though. So the prospective reader should be prepared. But maybe that will be revealed more in the next issue...Revolver Freak.
