
(3.5 stars, rounded down, I think)
To be honest, after reflecting on it, I’m a little disappointed in this third volume of the marvellous Rat Queens series. Picking up where the second volume left off, this sees the Queens travel to Mage U with their Elven wizard Hannah to try and rescue her father, who has got himself into so much trouble that even being tenured won’t help him.
Others have complained about the change to the artwork in this volume, but I reread the previous two volumes immediately before starting this one and didn’t notice. That’s probably just my failures of observation, but to me the art is as pretty as ever.
The main issue I had with this volume was that the rest of the Queens were mostly sidelined in favour of Hannah (who’s never been my favourite) and she makes some… poor… decisions that will affect the future of the series (if there is one, as there seem to be a lot of rumours floating around, but nothing solid on if the series will continue or not). Dee got almost nothing in this volume and Violet (with her excellent new beard) fares little better. The marvellous Betty gets some back story hinted at, and the most fantastic (if not relevant at all [probably] to the plot) encounter with an ice dragon which made me laugh out loud.
Some of the jumps between scenes were disjointed and I had to read some bits through several times before I got it, but there’s still a lot of good stuff here and I desperately want it to get back to being the amazingly good, funny and irreverent series that it was in the first couple of volumes.