Luke Owen reviews the first issue of IDW’s new Danger Girl series…
It’s three times the ACTION, three times the THRILLS, and three times the DANGER!!! Abbey, Sydney and Sonya embark on three different knuckle-clenching adventures, each an epic tale of intrigue and derring-do, and each drawn by a different fantastic artist—It’s a triple-play of danger that will climax with the biggest surprise of the year!
From the first panel, you know where you are with Danger Girl: Trinity – a captive busty woman on a pirate boat searching for a jewel that is being held by an evil man with a pet monkey in an eyepatch. Switch off your brains folks, this is going to be a bumpy ride.
Danger Girl: Trinity #1 is a wonderfully cheesy comic with some corny dialogue, 50s TV show action and Indiana Jones and James Bond inspired set pieces. The original Danger Girl series always felt like the comic equivalent of Charlie’s Angels mixed with Dr Jones and 007 and this new series is definitely in that same mould – but that is also where some of the problems lie.
Remember those McG Charlie’s Angels movies that tried to claim they empowered women with ‘strong female characters’ but paraded them around in skimpy clothes and treated them like busty sex objects? Well Danger Girl: Trinity does pretty much the same thing. While some of the more James Bond-y Indiana Jones-y moments are good fun and it’s delightfully over-the-top, there is also a large portion of the comic where one of the women walks around in their underwear for no reason other than for her to be drawn in her underwear. It devalues the main pull of the comic when you display your ‘strong females’ as objects of desire as opposed to simply arse-kicking spies.
However, I’ve read some comments from female readers who seem to think that these characters are fine and that them being paraded as sex symbols for male readers is acceptable. So what do I know?
Moral issues aside, this is quite a fun little comic with some good artwork, stilton-level writing and an easy-going atmosphere. I would be lying if I said I wasn’t looking forward to the next comic and I would be telling massive porky-pies if I said that a bad guy in a fez wasn’t the best thing I’ve seen in a comic in quite some time. There are probably deeper-seated issues with the comic from a female perspective, but all I can say is that it may be dumb, but I think Danger Girl: Trinity is harmless fun.
Luke Owen is one of Flickering Myth’s co-editor and the host of the Month in Review show for Flickering Myth’s Podcast Network. You can follow him on Twitter @LukeWritesStuff.
Originally published April 18, 2013. Updated November 6, 2019.
