It’s been over a year, and I still don’t think I can put into words what Pretty Deadly means to me. It resonates in a way that very few works of fiction do. My tweet from when I first picked it up, in June of 2014 still stands:
I've read Pretty Deadly vol 1 twice in the first week of owning it. I'm blown away. Reminds me of picking up The Sandman for the first time.
— Seelix the Ninth (@seelix) June 19, 2014
I still pick this book up and read it at least once a month. It has a permanent spot on my coffee table, since every time I try to put it on the shelf I sit down and start flipping through it instead. Kelly Sue DeConnick’s myth-tinged Western storyline, Emma Rios’s drawing and Jordie Bellaire’s colors are the perfect combination.
For those who aren’t familiar, Pretty Deadly is a story about Death’s daughter’s origin story… I don’t want to explain it any more than that because the unfolding of the story is perfect. Currently, there is one volume out, so it’s a quick read. I would highly recommend it even if you don’t generally read comics.
Best of all? Once you’ve read it, you won’t have to wait over a year for more! The first new issue comes out next week!
This costume was really easy to put together. The only thing I had to make were the holsters for the guns. Everything else was found pieces, or things I had from other costumes (the gun belts are actually from my River Song costume, so I had to sling them carefully to hide the Tardis engravings).
The hardest part was the makeup. Since the art is so stylized, finding a method to get the painterly look of the character and have it not look clown-ish on me took several tries. Eventually I settle on a mix of white cake makeup and my usual foundation for the skull base color. I mixed the white with a little foundation so that as it wore off, it would look more stylized, and not just like a mess. The outline was done in a eye liner pencil and then smudged out with eye shadow under to give it some depth. I used the same black eye shadow around my eyes. For the wounds on my body I just used bruise makeup (though I probably should have used more. I don’t look quite as bedraggled as Ginny does).
The photos below were all taken by Paul Cory Photography at DragonCon 2014. We did a photo shoot Monday morning just off the convention grounds. Deathface Ginny is me (Seelix!) and Big Alice is my friend and fellow cosplayer Faceless. She also helped wrangle the lighting.
I love the colors in this photo so much. It really feels like a page from the book to me. Paul did an excellent job capturing the feel of the book… given that he hadn’t read it at the time!
Deathface Ginny and Big Alice have an (obviously) rocky relationship in volume one. I’m excited to see how this relationship will be developed further in volume two!
Butterflies figure prominently in the symbolism of the book, and I love the detail that Faceless put into her Big Alice costume, adding a butterfly to the back of her cloak.
Fun fact: the decorative plates on the handle fell off of this prop gun during the photo shoot, so I’m holding it on for all of these pictures.
And a bonus picture, taken from when I was checking to see what the costume would look like all on: I also have a coat to match the costume, but I wrangling it in 90 degree heat during an Atlanta summer just wasn’t optimal.
