By Dustin Cabeal

One can only imagine what the toxic side of the comic fanbase describes this Garth Ennis story as when complaining that “he’s lost a step” or some such crap. I’m sure “woke” and “broke” are thrown around, but I have no personal interest in tracking down what people are saying about comics and stories. I’m here to put out my thoughts on the lure and see what I can reel back in. That and otherwise, I would spend this entire review fighting against some opinion I saw somewhere instead of reviewing the comic.

The Ribbon Queen is a socially aware story. It’s not unusual for Garth Ennis to write a story like this; it’s just that so many people have been lost in his ultra-violent stories that they forget the underlying connection to the world events at the time of the stories' release. It’s something that he’s done throughout his entire career, be it with mixed results of course. No one nails it 100% of the time. In the case of The Ribbon Queen, a great deal of time is spent including these real-world events and subjects that have populated the news, social media, and society at large for the past several years. The main problem being that it’s not attempting to answer or solve any of these problems/subjects; it’s just stating them and using them to dive into fantasy horror.