The series draws to its painful close.
Creative Staff:
Story: Emma Beeby
Art: Ariela Kristantina
Colors: Pat Masioni
Letters: Sal Cipriano
What They Say:
Final episode! As Margarethas trial defense falls apart, she contemplates how Mata Hari the dancer became Mata Hari the spy–prepared to undertake a great mission for France to free her to be with the ‘great love’ of her life, away from war, poverty and memories of her past. But, her fate is set: she must die, and all thats left for her to decide is how she will face it and what legacy she will leave behind.
Content: (please note that content portions of a review may contain spoilers):
The Mata Hari miniseries has been one that was a challenge from the outside in capturing as much of her life as possible, which with as complex and complicated as it was is near impossible. Emma Beeby has woven a lot of different threads here with the grounding piece, to me, being her time in prison at the end of her life and over those 244 days of confinement. With a couple of months between issues, Mata Hari is an even harder read since it was pretty dense before and now the passage of time hits it as well and all that I’ve read in between. Beeby delivers a very packed finale with what it covers here and Ariela Kristantina puts in a sprawlingly massive job in bringing it to life with so many neat flowing elements to tie the pages together that it’s simply a delight to absorb visually.
Honestly, as a finale, I’m hard pressed to really put much into words about it. The time of her jailing is what proves to be the most interesting as we see her dealing with all the memories while being accused of so many lies. Such is her life since coming back to Paris with the way the accusations have flown and her time here has her reflecting on what she’s lost while still doing her best to hold onto her dignity. What becomes clear is just how much pre-judgment was put into play here as her trial concludes with the expectation of a few days for the judges to come to a decision. That they put it all together in an hour says plenty and it all falls to the execution itself. Kristantina delivers this as tastefully as one can, showing her life and the things that made her come alive, but the result is the same, though at least the epilogue handles some of the fallout.
The bulk of the book are the flashbacks to various parts of her journey and, quite frankly, it all becomes a blur to me. It moves back and forth too much, covers so many different areas, and in some ways doesn’t feel like it takes a real position on anything. It showcases just how her life had gone but something about it simply made it hard for me to connect with it here at the end with all the travel and the unreliability of the truth among so many.
In Summary:
Mata Hari’s story is not one that I think can be told in the amount of space given to it in this series and it’s one that I don’t think works well told in such a chaotic chronological sense. I lost track of the narrative early on overall because of the jumping back and forth and then a nearly three month gap between the fourth and fifth issues made it impossible to really connect with. Emma Beeby definitely connects with her and wants to bring the story to life and Ariela Kristantina has something that’s just magical here in what she gets to illustrate. It’s so rare to work with someone like this in terms of Margaretha’s age and her journey that it’s easy to see why people wanted to work on this and tell the tale. It’s definitely got a lot going for it but I struggled with a lot of aspects of it throughout.
Grade: B
Age Rating: 17+
Released By: Dark Horse Comics
Release Date: September 12th, 2018
MSRP: $3.99
