As much as I love Garth Ennis, I never picked up a single issue of Jennifer Blood. It might have had something to do with the ratio of variant covers to regular issues. I always suspect that means a series is terrible, and needs to rely on customers buying multiple copies.

When I saw that Jennifer Blood was spinning off a series called Ninjettes, I was…I wasn’t anything. I was barely apathetic. But, even though there are more titles out this week than there have been for the last three (at least in this store), there weren’t a lot that appealed to me, so I figured I’d pick up the first two issues of Ninjettes.

There’s a style to the dialog in the first issue that worried me. Stylized dialog is often the tool of an inadequate writer. Al Ewing seems fully aware of this, and only puts the stylized dialog in certain characters’ mouths. Granted, the main characters. Still, it’s a choice and not a crutch. The characters in Ninjettes are easy to differentiate by their speech patterns in ways that, say, Bendis’s Avengers for the last four years or so, aren’t.

There’s nothing terribly original in the plot line. It even seems a little gauche to start the series with an assassin killing a pedophile. Yes, pedophiles are awful. It is therefore real easy to make you identify with a killer if she is only killing a pedophile. However, when she goes on to kill the kid, too, because he won’t shut up, you realize you’re not necessarily reading an easily plotted book, you’re probably reading something written or inspired by Garth Ennis.

The art is fair to middling. The wider the camera pans out, the less impressive the pencils look. At times, they appear pixellated. Also, the proportions of necks to faces appear incongruous, but it didn’t interfere with my initial reading of the story, it just threw me when I went back to comment on the art.

If you’re looking for something fun in the way Ennis books are fun, Ninjettes is pretty good. It’s not going to change the face of comics, but it’s an amusing distraction if you’ve got money to burn.