Death or Glory sounds great as the name of a comic revolving around a death-defying car racer named Glory. Then again, in this context, who's not picking Glory...?
Minimal spoiler version: Glory was raised on the open road by parents who dedicated themselves to living free from the trappings of modern society. They found a small society of like-minded travelers and stayed as far from the world as they could while still living with, you know, cars and trucks and electricity. To some degree her background comes off as a libertarian fantasy—the joy of living in the world unfettered—but it's balanced out by the difficulties they face, including the one that puts Glory's story into motion.
The first issue goes all-in selling you on a world and a character that will be, at minimum, entertaining as hell. It's not uncommon for comics to craft this sort of high-octane opener to keep people coming back for at least a few more issues, then diving directly into the slower part of the story and killing their momentum. Death or Glory avoids this, keeping the pace up while still finding time to tell us the things we need to know about the world around Glory and how she got to the point where someone's trying to cryo-freeze her to death.
One thing we don't get much of after the first issue is Glory's car-racing skills. She bootlegs her way into heroism, fulfilling the promise of the cover as we watch her juke fools out of their lanes, but while the other issues are fairly heavy on action in general, there's not so much of her driving her way to victory over her antagonists. Is that bad? Eh, depends on what you want. If you just like the promise of action and the type doesn't matter much or at all, it's great. If the draw of the lady with the race car was what got you, there's reason to think we'll get back to that, but it's not as present as you might hope across this volume.
But the way Glory is dragged into the problems around her is done as well as you'd expect Rick Remender to do it. Even the hard problems are never simple, and Glory finds her situation devolving from an almost impossible series of heists, nearly certain to get her killed, into something far worse. It's a transfixing ride, and by the end of this volume, the story starts to open up, leaving any number of players able to get into Glory's business—for good or ill.
How it compares to some of Remender's other work:
Better than: Tokyo Ghost
About equal to: Seven to Eternity
Not as good as: Low
Score: 87 (which would be the number on her race car, if she had a race car) out of 100.
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