I have been poking around reading Cosmoknights, Volume 1 for ages now. I have had and lost multiple online copies. I thought about ordering a copy, decided against it and then one day I found another online edition. I waited and waited to read until one day I was cleaning up the links I had and found it again. Okay, okay. I get it! The book is from 2019 and still I have an active link? Guess I better read it!
With Hannah Templer’s graphic novel, you can both judge the book by its cover and not at the same time. You can see that there will be some sort of Space Soldiers, but that doesn’t give you the entire picture. It is an interesting story of patriarchy and the ways one tries to resist that. The princess of that community is “jousted off” to the last knight standing. If you win, you can kiss, marry, or sell off to the patron of your choice. But not everyone is into that kind of system. The publisher’s description says “Princeless meets TV’s Firefly in a feminist webcomic-turned-graphic novel.” I have no idea what Princeless is about, but Firefly has some connection. Though things are a bit more “now” and less “wild west,” but if you get out into space more, you will have a more dystopian city atmosphere. It is Medieval meets Small Town Mechanic meets Space Knights and they clash hard, as do the jousting Cosmoknights in the tournaments. And the winner takes all. That is, if they live through it.
There are traditional comic illustrations with graphic novel shine. The busy pages can make things a bit bogged down, but work for the flow of things. We not only get Queer Grrl Power 101, but a look at current events.