'Pretty Deadly' showcases a lush Western fantasy world

Brian Truitt | USA TODAY

Kelly Sue DeConnick wanted to make the comic-book equivalent of a Sergio Leone spaghetti Western. That is, until a talking crow, a dead rabbit for a narrator, a heroine with a Mexican death-mask face tattoo, her horse made of smoke, a 7-foot-tall female gunslinger and Death himself moseyed into town.

Created by DeConnick and artist Emma Rios, the upcoming Image Comics book Pretty Deadly (debuting Oct. 23) opens the saloon doors on a vast supernatural Old West landscape introducing Ginny, a reaper of vengeance who also happens to be Death's daughter.

"You could comfortably say it could be shelved on the fantasy shelf — there are no dragons, no elves, nothing like that, but it is mythological," says DeConnick, who also writes Marvel Comics' Captain Marvel series.

"There is Death incarnate and he's got this rabbit skull face and the story is narrated by a dead rabbit to a butterfly. It's not strict realism."

The first story arc acts as an origin story for Ginny, whose personality borrows a bunch from Leone's "Man with No Name" character, DeConnick says. "She only speaks when she needs to."

She's been bound to the spirit world for most of her life, but Ginny's set loose for one particular act of vengeance she needs to carry out.

"We get to know the person she's going after and while it's clear that he deserves it, it's also clear he's repentant and you kind of don't want to see it happen," DeConnick says. "How that plays out forms her character and sets up the new status quo that takes us to the second arc."

The Pretty Deadly mythos is enriched by Ginny's supporting cast, from Sissy (a girl in a vulture clock), to the blind man Fox to the prostitute Lily to villainous Big Alice, a gorgeous mountain of a woman after the elusive Johnny Coyote who has to duck under doorjambs to enter a building.

"All of them have their own ambitions and very different psychology and behavior that affects their looks and acting," Rios says. "It makes me try harder to be nuanced with this stuff."

In an old Clint Eastwood movie, one could imagine a big dude as the archetype Big Alice fills as a character, but for Rios she is very feminine: "Huge but all about elegance, graceful, educated and more self-conscious about her beauty than Ginny, for example. So, I can´t imagine her as a square-jawed actor.

"We are not swapping gender roles," the artist adds. "That is something really important to me and that I really like from this story. There are a lot of female characters, they feel totally natural, and they belong to this place."

DeConnick agrees. "I always liked those female-led vengeance movies because I could imagine myself in that powerful role. I always wanted to be the Man with No Name — I wanted to be that cool and that powerful.

"Letting women take these roles, there's no reason why not. It's not a history of the West. Why not have the big, scary big bad be this gorgeous woman?"

John Wayne also never had to deal with a beast born out of a river of blood. That creature in Pretty Deadly is tied to how Death fits into the life cycle of everything, according to DeConnick.

"The universe demands that Death understand what it means to take life. It's time for this Death to die, and this Death decides he doesn't want to go," says the writer, who teases that there is a connection to Death, who has a rabbit skull for a head, and the deceased bunny narrating the comic.

Some of the supernatural elements for Rios come out of Japanese cinema and the works of Masaki Kobayashi and Hayao Miyazaki that pull from folklore and spiritual elements. And for her, the slow pacing, lack of dialogue and kind of heroes represented in Pretty Deadly are influenced by old samurai films but also things such as Leone's A Fistful of Dollars.

"They are all about earning some kind of danger, of climax," explains Rios, who's working with colorist Jordie Bellaire on Pretty Deadly. "In Leone´s movies, things feel disturbing even if nothing supernatural is really happening. That´s because of the aesthetics — his choices are based on austerity and impact. Empty squares, symmetries, long shadows, all that helps to improve the tension."

For a sequence in the first issue Rios also came up with using the Spanish cantares de cego, where blind men would come into towns and sing ballads, take up collection and utilize banners of sequential images. (In Pretty Deadly, the scene shows how Death fell in love with a woman and with her sired a little girl, whom he took and raised in the spirit world.)

"As it's a comic strip by itself, it has a lot of narrative possibilities as a meta comic resource," says the artist, who had previously worked with DeConnick on the Marvel miniseries Osborn.

It's all very different from the stark, brutal Leone-esque project DeConnick first envisioned, and she admits that she initially fought the lushness that the world of Pretty Deadly started to show organically.

"We didn't have any progress until I finally threw up my hands and was like, 'Alright, if this is what it wants to be, this is what it wants to be.' And now I'm happy with it," DeConnick says.

At one point, her friend, writer Charlie Huston, sent her a line by Leone himself that was apropos: "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."

"I had chills," DeConnick recalls. "Even though it has all these fantastic elements, the stakes feel real and it feels grounded.

"So in that way we were doing the Leone book we were setting out to do anyway. I was just wrong about what that meant."