A poor farmer in the field, working hard to keep his family fed, is suddenly attacked by a giant spider that burrows up from the ground. Just as the farmer and his family seemed doomed, enter our hero, Reyn (not that he gives his name, he is bad ass like that), who makes quick work of the monster in a well done action scene. Reyn immediately drops to his knees to pray, and these are the first real words of our protagonist. If the rest of the book were like pages 2 through 8, I would highly recommend trying out this book. Sadly, it is not.
The very first page is an image of Reyn traveling by horse in a wasteland with a series of paragraphs giving us information we don’t need. It tries to set things up as epic without needing to, we don’t need a history lesson or a promise of a returning order of good now. We need to know who our characters are.
Which we start to do in the scene I described above. And the following scene with a happy farm family conversing with Reyn at dinner isn’t bad, it is just okay. We get some information dumped in there via conversation, and random ogling of the farmer’s daughter. The latter resulting in two pages of said daughter offering herself to Reyn at her father’s request in an attempt to get Reyn to stay for a while. If not for this scene, we wouldn’t know Reyn is capable of getting laid, an important feature to any main character.
With that romp out of the way we have more Reyn as a traveler. This results in the introduction of our other protagonist, who is also our wordy narrator, Seph. Seph is instantly in trouble, because reasons, and fights off a lot of goons on her own. She then goes to yell at Reyn for not helping fight off said goons, because otherwise the pair would never team up. Thankfully the book kind of realizes this and has Reyn mention that Seph was obviously kicking ass so needed zero help. Then come more bad guys…. who will have to wait until the next issue to get trounced.
For every good page in this comic there are two heavy handed or just cliché ones. With time this could become worth reading, but as it stands it is just a decent comic. We deserve better than just decent.
Score: 2/5
Writer: Kel Symons Artist: Nate Stockman Publisher: Image Comics Release Date: 1/21/15 Format: Ongoing; Print/Digital