"There's the way things are and the way you want 'em to be.
One way you can navigate with compromise.
The other you have to throw your life at with no promise of even affecting the smallest change."
"The balance between doing what's right an' the overwhelmingly human sense of self preservation.
Justice is a mortal-made concept and every man's definition's different.
A billion souls, all knowing what's right for everyone else, until their justice conflicts with their interests."
"No one is a good person.
You tell yourself people are good for an artificial sense of order and security.
We are simply machines fueled by desire.
Fulfilled by any means.
Men like you and your father punish themselves by adhering to values that the world around them does not share.
-Striving for freedom and helping others ain't a punishment.
That road isn't really about helping others...
... it's about making yourself a hero.
But the pragmatist lives on the graves of those idealists.
-An ideal gives a man something to live for.
It also makes them delusional and easier for men like me to manipulate them.
Convince a man he's a righteous hero and he'll march to any war with fervour.
He knows he's good and right, thus his enemy must be wrong and evil."
Yeah. I only finished it yesterday after the two available volumes had been sitting on my shelves for months and months, and I'm feeling a bit stupid. This one is going to grow bigger with time. If you want a comparison: It's like a mix of the ideas behind the Darkness that Comes Before, Tokyo Ghost's more fantastical elements (read: it's definitely more fantasy than sci-fi), and something that is obviously out of its mind on drugs. There's just so much going on: The constantly widening and opening up magic system, the insanely varied environments, the ideas, the story, the pacing, it's all just so damn fast.
This is by the same team that created that other super good sci-fi comic; Fear Agent, so there's no reason why this should've taken so long to get a look, and honestly, I have no excuses. Either way though: it was totally worth it.
As you can see, Jerome Opena's art style is insanely intricate.
It's maintained throughout 9 issues except where James Harren takes over in issues 7 and 8 where different stories start to diverge. Anything other than the art style featured above can only be a step down, so don't hold that against him.
And the story, man, the story is a moody one. Though, I'll admit, it can be quite hard to follow.
We follow around Adam Osidis on a quest of vengeance and self-preservation after an attack on his father's farm where he and his family live. The Mud King, the so-called God of Whispers, has finally come to deal with the last of the magic-wielding Mosak warriors. That's issue one.
By the end of Issue three we finally understand what the title is about* and we've been constantly bombarded with some rather original world building.
-----
This story and especially the art style needs a large print version though. I do believe I'll be getting the deluxe version when it finally comes out, probably somewhere, some months after volume 3 comes out, if Image does its usual thing. Volume 2 ended on a very nice emotional cliffhanger so as Volume three is slated for release somewhere in December so I'll be getting that when it comes out too.
*although I'm guessing it's one of those titles that's going to have multiple meanings when the entirety of the telling has been done.
No comments:
Post a Comment