Animal Liberators Return in Matt Miner’s New Comic Series, “Critical Hit”

by Rabbit / Earth First! Newswire

Matt Miner’s newest comic series, Critical Hit, goes on sale tomorrow. The story follows two characters from his previous Animal Liberation Front-inspired comic runs—Jeannette from the Liberator series and Sarah from Liberator/Earth Crisis: Salvation of Innocents—working together to continue their crusade to stop the exploitation and torture of nonhuman animals.

In past Liberator comics, Sarah and Jeannette have taken on vivisectors, fur farmers and dog fighters. In the first issue of Critical Hit they take a stab at hunt sabotage—both the traditional get-in-the-way-of-hunters-and-scare-away-the-hunted kind, and the more incendiary variety.

Though this may be a spiritual sequel, Critical Hit seems to be taking the stories of these animal liberators in a new direction. The first issue is just a beginning to the story arc, but there are already more elements of suspense, as well as deeper exploration into the characters’ backgrounds than in the previous series.

As animal liberation actions continue to steadily take place around the planet, and after the summer of 2013’s unprecedented number of ALF actions in the US, it’s a good time for some positive animal activism propaganda to be finding its way onto more mainstream platforms. Though the actions of these characters are a bit romanticized (they are heroes in a comic book, after all), the past series have made an effort to discuss topics like strategy, use of tactics, and security culture, which gives me hope that Critical Hit will continue that trend, maybe even increasing its critical eye.

In fact, in an interview with Multiversity Comics, Matt Miner said that the title of the new comic was partially inspired by his thoughts on the usefulness of certain tactics over others: “The name is a nod to my D&D days and also the common belief in the underground movements that one could theoretically take out a target in one strike—one night of illegal action—therefore accomplishing what 20 years of protests could never do.”

After reading the first issue, I’m excited to see what direction this new series takes. The fact that this comic exists at all, and is being sold in stores, is a good sign, I think, for the animal rights movement. But there is still a lot of work to be done to before non-violent underground activism is accepted as valuable, and necessary, by the mainstream. As Jeannette says in the first issue of Critical Hit: “Sometimes doing the right thing means you end up looking like the bad guy.”