Queen & Country Volume 3: Crystal Ball

"Operation Crystal Ball": The continuing adventures of British secret agent Tara Chase find her, in the immediate aftermath of 9/11, enmeshed in the politics of Middle Eastern terrorism. One member of her group paratroops into Iraq on a covert mission, while Chase heads elsewhere, with explosive results. As with the earlier volumes, this story zips along at a brisk clip, although with the tilt towards Middle Eastern politics, one sense that the series could get mired down. The intrusion of real life and (real) recent history has its troubles. For one thing, author Greg Rucka gets the whole Iraq-sponsoring-Al Qaida thing wrong (as did a lot of people at the time...) and references to places that were then unfamiliar seem a little iffy seen after several years of war abroad. A new artist is brought on board, as well, and some readers may have a hard time with the transition into Leandro Fernandez's work... I was put off by his tendency towards cariacature and grotesquery; in particular, I disliked his stylized, hypersexualized portrayal of Ms. Chase in the first episode, where suddenly she has a pencil-thin waist, a jutting, angular bosom and pouty Angelina Jolie lips.. Fernandez tones it down in later issues, but the radical shift in how Chase is presented was depressing: the point of her character seemed to be what a hard case she was, not that she was some tight-shirted, nerd-fantasy pinup girl. Oh, well. I still zoomed through the book and ran out to get the next one, so I suppose it was okay in the end. Still definitely worth checking out!