Mata Hari is back this month with the second chapter. Titled; Bare Breast, this chapter goes deeper into the famous spy’s past. In the first chapter we saw her capture, but here now we see how she is handling being in prison, and how the Captain who is trying to get a confession from her is obviously already sure of her guilt.
The timeline is a bit jumbled here, going back and forth in her past and it gets a bit hard to follow in some parts but that does not take away from the enjoyment of the story, or at least not for me. We learn about her time as a teacher which was the first time she was subjected to the attention of a man, and would, I think, be a large part of why she became who she did. Next in the procession of her life, she meets her husband and begins the first of many new lives that she would go through.
As I have always been fascinated by her as a historical person, this comic is serving to only make me more interested. I know it’s a mix of fact and fiction, but the writer, Emma Beeby, is making it come alive so well that it feels like it’s all true! I especially liked how she showed the woman herself, in the prison, to be very contradictory to herself. She attempts to use her wiles and when it fails her anger is swift but short lived, makes me wonder if she is already working on a new plan to use against the captain, and how she will handle if that fails as well.
Mata Hari is definitely not for a young audience. It is released form Dark Horse today and I give it a solid 4 stars.
