By Dustin Cabeal

I’ve never been an orphan, but I cannot imagine that 16 in the age in which you wash out of any orphanage program. If so, we really need to come together with our city leaders and correct this wrong. How do we expect 16-year-olds to go out into the world and support themselves when they’re not even legal adults? And yet our main character has turned 16 and is taking what little money she has to visit her dead mother’s grave and stay at a B&B… after getting a tattoo that she’s not of legal age to get.

It's fairly obvious that the Ballad of Ronan is being written by two men. Their insight into a teenage girl’s mind is very superficial and lacks a lot of depth. There’s no mention of the dangers this young girl would face travelling alone as a runaway and how quickly she’d be without money or assistance upon using it all to stay a week at a Bed and Breakfast place.

There’s a parallel story that if I had to guess sets up the main character as being from another dimension having been switched at birth with a fairy’s child. The mother dies during childbirth, but before that she tells him to take care of their son no matter what. He then holds the baby until he falls asleep, and the child dies. I know there’s a formula shortage but doing all you can probably means doing a lot more than falling asleep holding a baby. Are their no midwives to help in the fairy’s world? A fairy midwife that will tell him that he needs to find someone to breast feed that baby asap.

The gist to the rest is that our main character can see some evil things that no one else can, I wonder if she’ll fight them and travel the country hunting them down and protecting people. Or she’ll get sucked through a portal. Most likely she’ll just meet up with Ronan.

There is way too much filler for this first issue. The pacing is terrible, frankly. It spends too much time with the dad and baby to just wash away everything that’s said with a baby swap. At the same time, we spend too much time waiting for our main character to run away from the church orphanage… which turns kids out onto the streets when they hit 16. We just hangout with our main character and nothing more. By the time something does start to happen it’s the end of the issue.

The art is amateurish and mostly saved by the coloring. The backgrounds are empty giving the book a lifeless feel. Due to all the exposition and chatting it’s mostly just talking figures and walking back and forth on the same background. The fairies are well designed and have the most detail. It was clearly the artist’s favorite thing to illustrate as the rest lacks the same amount of detail and care. As I said, the coloring saves the issue. It would be hard to look out if it wasn’t colored as well as it is. That’s not to say that it’s perfect either, but it’s doing what it can with what it has to work with. The background could have used another hue to elevate the panels instead of dull, muted tones.

Sadly, the story doesn’t explain enough of what’s going on to really give you the desire to return for more. A first issue should at least tell you what the plot is, but it seems as if you’ll need to read the second issue to figure that out. For now, it’s about an aged-out orphan girl spending money on tattoos and B&B’s, which isn’t believable or interesting. I hate to bag on first time creators, but this book needed another draft and more background art.

Walsh Brothers
Jason
Pucci
Carey

Score: 2/5