Danger Girl #1 - Image Comics

DANGER GIRL #1, March 1998

Weighing in as the fifth best-selling title of March 1998, at least according to “Diamond Comics Distributors”, this thirty-page periodical must have had its 109,619 readers squealing in utter delight as its furiously fast-paced antics, with authors Andy Hartnell and J. Scott Campbell’s irrefutably living up to their pre-publication promise that this mini-series would take “a bit of an old fashioned approach” and be “very much an action adventure book.” Indeed, even those within its impressively-sized audience who missed the previously printed preview pamphlet “Prelude To Danger!”, would quickly have been caught up in Abbey Chase’s breakneck attempt to recapture “the elusive golden skull of Koo-Koo Diego”, courtesy of the collaborative creators providing both a useful black and white summary of their story's earlier events, as well as a non-stop introductory boat chase over some troubled waters in Costa Rica; “Always the one with the temper that Abbey. Always having to destroy something. But alas, three homes, a yacht, and a chateau in the Alps later, she’s finally dead! Love makes you do crazy things.”

Admittedly, after so thrilling a start Hartnell’s script for Issue One of “Danger Girl” perhaps somewhat understandably has to slow down for a short while, even if it is to allow its fans to catch their breaths following Natalia Kassle’s ultimately successful, last-second rescue attempt atop a thunderously powerful waterfall. But even so dialogue-driven a sequence as Deuce introducing his “eponymous group of three sexy female secret agents” is imbued with plenty of panache, courtesy of some fantastically pencilled flashback panels by Campbell, which depict the former British Secret Service Agent in his heyday, and the rest of the team’s decidedly adventurous credentials.

Moreover, it isn’t too long until this comic’s titular characters are off on a surveillance assignment in France, and Sydney Savage’s “fat guy”, the Peach, demonstrates there is a much more murderous side to the “illegal arms dealer who has ties to the Hammer Empire” than the softly spoken, balding criminal’s physical appearance would suggest. In fact, the shockingly sudden, cold-blooded killing of the “Hungarian art thief known as Rico Lugosi” probably caused a fair few of this book’s bibliophiles to momentarily drop this comic in their consternation. Albeit the subsequent frantically-paced vehicle chase involving the Australian Danger Girl and a lorry load of enemy agents would soon have had them once again thoroughly enthralled in this publication’s sense-shattering shenanigans…

Plot: Andy Hartnell & J. Scott Campbell, and Pencils: J. Scott Campbell