Critical Hit, Vol. 1 by Matt Miner

Critical Hit, Vol. 1 Reviews

• 
  Amanda M

  3.5 stars
  
  I love the liberator series but this was more about the human characters and their problems. It also had a horror element that had little to do with animal rights and liberation and was just a vehicle to drive the characters to darker places. I didn't hate it but it wasn't my favorite either. Be warned - this needs a trigger warning for pretty much everything so if you are sensitive to abuse (animal and human) or violence in any way, you should be careful with this title.
• 
  Aaron

  Sarah and Jeanette are in a bad way.
  
  They aren't newbies. They know the risks. It's just that things tend to go sideways, fast, when one or two incipient oversights muster some critical inertia of their own. Such is the case for the two animal rights activists who slither ever so gently into the theater of domestic terrorism. Freeing dogs bred for fighting for cash is one thing. Destruction and theft of private property? In CRITICAL HIT, one episode leads to another, darker encounter with karma. Lucky for readers, these two women have survived their own share of karmic reprisal.
  
  From the ashes of Liberator (2013) and Liberator: Earth Crisis (2014), both clever jaunts along the same narrative lines, rises CRITICAL HIT, whose duo of animal lovers find their cause sending them into increasingly dark and dangerous territory. What begins as a trek into the woods to distract and annoy a few regional deer hunters turns into a life-or-death struggle for the women's own lives. The cast is larger, the conflicts are increasingly literal, and the stakes are higher.
  
  It's not as if Sarah and Jeanette haven't been in a pinch before. The comic pulls readers through two or three years of a sometimes awkward, sometimes heartfelt friendship that sees the two young women standing strong with one another through thick and thin. Alcoholic relatives. Drug-addicted friends. Abusive partners. The list goes on. But somehow, Sarah and Jeanette have remained buddies. So when a bid to trash local hunters turns sour, and the hunters set their sights on Sarah and Jeanette themselves, readers invariably hold their breath. Has their luck finally run out?
  
  The strengths of CRITICAL HIT rest along familiar lines: compelling lead characters, economical visual pacing, clean writing. The art doesn't waste any space, the coloring is fantastic, and the writing, while playing to the character's increasingly breathless motivations, isn't over the top. The book's weaknesses almost exclusively regard the story's nonlinear progression. The first chapter alone, for example, jumps around from the present time, to three years ago, to two years ago, to two weeks ago, and then back to the present day for the final four pages. Each issue is like this. One imagines reading CRITICAL HIT in its original, sequential, single-issue format, and finding the effort to keep track of all the twists and turns rather impossible.
  
  The story's wayward linearity makes it difficult to care about any character other than Sarah and Jeanette, which is somewhat problematic considering how many of them there are. And while all of the backstories and sidestories prove instructive in generating context for the young women and their mission, CRITICAL HIT only narrowly pieces the puzzle together in time for readers to know what's what by the final few pages. It's a good comic with exquisite drive, but it's easier to get lost than not.
• 
  Cabrik

  Trop court ça méritais plus de développement