DEATH RIDES ON THE WIND IN PRETTY DEADLY
DeConnick and Ríos team up for a supernatural Western from Image Comics
Ginny
is Death’s daughter, a reaper of vengeance. She rides through the West
on a horse made of smoke, her face tattooed with her heritage, and deals
in revenge. She is the mysterious, elusive center of PRETTY DEADLY, the first creator-owned comics series by acclaimed writer Kelly Sue DeConnick (Captain Marvel, Ghost, Osborn) and artist Emma Ríos (The Amazing Spider-Man, Osborn).
The first five issues of the critically acclaimed title will be
collected in its first trade paperback volume, THE SHRIKE, in April.
Simultaneously
beautiful and savage, PRETTY DEADLY unfolds over the course of an
ongoing story that DeConnick and Ríos developed together, creating a
world and characters that are entirely their own. At the same time,
DeConnick and Ríos say, it’s almost as if PRETTY DEADLY has a will of
its own guiding the action.
“The
book is absorbing us while breathing on its own,” said Ríos. “Sometimes
I feel we are hidden behind a rock, gasping, watching the characters do
their things.”
“This
book has defied my directives at every turn, but made it up to me in a
series of goosebump moments where things came together as if by magic,”
said DeConnick.
Having worked together on Marvel’s Osborn,
DeConnick and Ríos found common ground in their love of Westerns and
Japanese cinema for PRETTY DEADLY. DeConnick was inspired by spaghetti
westerns, Japanese “pinky violence” films, and Grimm’s fairy tales,
while Ríos found her visual language for the series by absorbing both
Westerns and samurai films. Colorist Jordie Bellaire (THE MANHATTAN
PROJECTS, NOWHERE MEN) maintains the earthy, dusty atmosphere of the
art, as well as the magical tone of the story, thanks to a subdued
palette punctuated with bursts of vivid color.
“We
wanted a very Leone feel to it,” said DeConnick. “As we worked, I felt
we were straying from that original notion and though I came to love the
direction the book insisted on going, I felt a twinge of grief at the
loss of the Leone connection. I don't know why, but I did. Then a friend
of mine quoted this Leone line to me: ‘The important thing is to make a
different world, to make a world that is not now. A real world, a
genuine world, but one that allows myth to live. The myth is
everything.’ So in the end, it seems we haven't strayed at all.”
DeConnick and Ríos maintain a PRETTY DEADLY website, where they post images from the creation process, fan art, and answers to reader questions.
PRETTY DEADLY VOLUME ONE: THE SHRIKE by Kelly Sue DeConnick, Emma Ríos, and Jordie Bellaire will be in comic book stores on April 30 and in bookstores on May 13.
Praise for PRETTY DEADLY:
“[Pretty Deadly]
brazenly defies conventions of modern American comics while keeping
with the traditions of Westerns, Manga, and folklore; it ignores the
three-act structure to go back to older forms of storytelling and finds
power in them. Dark, alluring, and original, Kelly Sue DeConnick and
Emma Ríos’s Pretty Deadly gambles on itself and wins.”
– John Parker, Comics Alliance
“The
cycles of life, death, loss, and discovery are played out through this
spectral assortment of damaged souls, and the book’s visuals capture
that sense of ephemeral doom. Ríos’
art conjures a delicate sort of beauty from darkness both literal and
metaphorical, while Jordie Bellaire’s colors bestow even the bloodiest
of events with a vicious, violent elegance. It’s rare to see the type of
ambition behind a book such as this so artfully executed, but the
creators behind Pretty Deadly have concocted an epic that demands to be read.”
– Melissa Grey, IGN
“There's
a mythic quality to PRETTY DEADLY. It's so much bigger than the
physical space over which its cast is roaming; there are lives and
deaths and cosmic purposes at stake, and there's no clear answer to
who's good, who's bad, and who's innocent. Kelly Sue DeConnick is
proving, issue after issue, what a masterful storyteller she is,
architecting a dusty, revenge-y fairy tale that has us hooked.”
– Jen Aprahamian, Comics Vine
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ABOUT IMAGE COMICS
Image
Comics is a comic book and graphic novel publisher founded in 1992 by a
collective of best-selling artists. Image has since gone on to become
one of the largest comics publishers in the United States. Image
currently has five partners: Robert Kirkman, Erik Larsen, Todd
McFarlane, Marc Silvestri and Jim Valentino. It consists of five major
houses: Todd McFarlane Productions, Top Cow Productions, Shadowline,
Skybound and Image Central. Image publishes comics and graphic novels in
nearly every genre, sub-genre, and style imaginable. It offers science
fiction, fantasy, romance, horror, crime fiction, historical fiction,
humor and more by the finest artists and writers working in the medium
today. For more information, visit www.imagecomics.com.
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