Review by Lewis Savarese
Regardless of one’s initial expectations for a book written by mixed martial artist Ronda Rousey with art by Mike Deodato Jr., Expecting the Unexpected will considerably lower your anticipation for both creators’ work from here on out. With characters based on herself and her husband Travis Browne, this book functions as Rousey’s third autobiography after My Fight/Your Fight and Our Fight, swapping the world of combat sports for that of professional assassins. Rousey draws from her own journey towards motherhood to create a tedious tale of a pregnant hitwoman with a bounty on her head.
Mom, an assassin who stores weapons in a prosthetic pregnancy bump, is Rousey’s self-insert character drawn in her likeness by Deodato. Mom starts off as a freelance killer, but works her way up to salaried assassin employed by the Agency. The Agency is run by Mr. Brahma, depicted to resemble WWE manager Paul Heyman, although he behaves like disgraced WWE CEO Vince McMahon. His son Buddha, who looks like professional wrestler The Miz and mirrors his crass in-ring persona, is the Agency’s top hitman. Within five minutes of meeting Mom, Mr. Brahma puts a hit out on her because she incessantly references pop culture. While Mom does eventually sleep with her first target, former Agency hitman Hapa (the Travis Browne proxy), there is a price on her head before this transgression because she is annoying. This is an odd story beat, Mr. Brahma’s capriciousness is evidently meant to endear you to Mom and subsequently Hapa. However, by confusing pop culture knowledge for personality, Rousey pigeonholes her main character and trivialises the narrative.
After the first act, the remainder of the book focuses on Mom and Hapa’s attempt to reach an abortion clinic, along the way fighting off hordes of assassins led by Buddha. Deodato, a second degree karate black belt, and Rousey combine their talents to accentuate the role of fight choreography in their storytelling. The book’s back matter includes QR codes that redirect to choreography videos Rousey made in a gym for Deodato’s reference. Considering this pedigree you might expect action sequences that rival those of Kirby or Toriyama, but the results are middling at best. Deodato’s signature style of superimposing panel grids over his images rarely adds much to the proceedings and seems arbitrary. Only occasionally do these particular panel breaks draw the eye to a bit of action like Mom using a picture frame as a projectile to disarm Hapa. The far more effective artistic flourish that Deodato employs is the use of repeated figures to convey motion, similar to time-lapse photography.
Early on we are introduced to several Agency assassins and their specialities, but Deodato’s inconsistent rendering of physical characteristics makes it hard to discern whether they reappear later. His typical photorealistic figure drawing is lacking here, as bodies tend to have abnormal proportions and are draped in ill-fitting clothing. Two dreadlocked hitmen named Sam and Cam do reappear in a stairwell fight with Mom, but there is no demonstration of their previously alluded to firearms expertise. In fact, there is a sameness to all the fight scenes, with the locations providing the only real variety. Towards the end, it becomes increasingly difficult to shake the feeling that Rousey wrote this book to work through a WWE related grievance. Hopefully this exercise brought her closure, but if you expected anything of substance from this book, you will be disappointed.
