Having previously posted about The Shepherd on the site, I ended up funding the comic. After an acceptable amount of time passed, I received the book and was happy to check it out. I don’t have to review it, but hey… since it has the name of the site on the credits page, why not?
[su_quote]Synopsis: The Shepherd is about a woman who is a shepherd of a flock of fantasy animals that runs into an injured predator. She heals the beast, but poachers come looking for it to fulfill some revenge… and get paid.[/su_quote]
The unfortunate thing is that the story is very straight forward. There’s no big twist that happens with maybe the exception of the last page. The problem there is that we’re not coming back for another issue so we don’t particularly need that surprise. It does tie into the story, but not the entire story. What I'm getting at is that the payoff wasn't big enough compared to the rest of the story.
There’s a lot of excess to the story. A lot of details we don’t need about the world. The reason we don’t need all these details about the world is because we never leave this scene. The story takes place in one little piece of land for 90% of the time. The dialogue was also just okay. It wasn’t bad, but it was heavy on exposition at times and, again, there were elements that didn’t drive the story or develop anything relevant to the story we were reading. In a lot of ways, the writing attempts to set up a larger world, but we’re focused in on this one scene happening on this one day in time that we don’t need the rest of the world to understand.
The art is really good, but it’s forced to make characters stand around and talk which eats up the page count and doesn’t leave enough room for the fighting. The fighting is good, but it’s choppy. It needed more panels to really flow and look like a dynamic fight scene. Instead, it’s just actions and consequences and not much in-between. The creatures are great. I loved the look of the few we see. The creature design definitely stands out from the rest of the story. The line work is solid and the coloring is beautiful making the overall presentation of The Shepherd great.
I don’t regret supporting the book. I see potential from the entire creative team. I enjoy the premise a bit more than the execution, but the art is talented and elevates the story as much as it can. If there were more stories in this world, which it kind of alluded to, I would check them out. It’s just that I would want more than a one-shot. At the end of the day I'm glad I spent the money supporting it and would say it's worth yours as well.
[su_box title="Score: 3/5" style="glass" box_color="#8955ab" radius="6"]
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