I heard great things about Kim & Kim, and I was not disappointed. The first issue was so much fun that I ordered Volume One (which collects issues 1-4) before even finishing that first issue. My only complaint is that now I have to wait for Volume Two!

Kim & Kim is about two women who are “mostly platonic” best friends and partners in bounty hunting. Kim and Kim live in a futuristic world where everything is brightly colored and punk. One of the Kims carries an electric guitar. The other carries a pink machine gun. The first bounty has octopus arms. The Kims travel in a flying van.

The dialogue and illustrations are funny and full of crazy action and fashion and fourth-wall-breaking silliness. It’s like cotton candy in comic book form.

For all its goofiness, Kim & Kim does have real solidity in how the characters interact. Kim and Kim feel like real, long-time friends, both in their body language and their speech. The scene in which we discover that Kim Q. is transgender is one in which the two women discuss old crushes and gossip about their rival bounty hunters. They know each other completely, and it’s lovely the way they banter and converse like old friends and lean, physically, on each other in times of stress.

Kim and Kim are not the only female characters. There’s a mom and an auntie and friends and colleagues. There is also a pair of rival bounty hunters– two men, Saar and Columbus. They are rivals in the sense that when Kim and Kim get into a fight with them and win, they leave the guys with band-aids and Vicodin for the sake of old friendship.

So much of the joy of reading this book came from the variety of representation and the sense of shared history that the characters have and how that history draws some together and some apart.

I seriously love everything about this comic. I love the characters, I love the story, and I love the art. I love the supporting characters almost as much as I love Kim and Kim. I love that there’s a helpful list of conclusions to draw if you are attacked by robot gorillas, and I love that Kim Q. wants to open a punk bakery: “We’d bake like transgressive muffins and cakes that had ‘queeriarchy’ written on them in fondant and we’d live on love!”

Kim & Kim is whimsical, but there’s enough emotional connection between the characters, not to mention the shadow of their mysterious fathers, to keep the comic from being overly cutesy. It won’t be for everyone, but if you like kick-ass women, science fiction mixed with fantasy mixed with rent troubles, female friendship, characters of color, and queer characters, then you’ll love this book.