“And when later we find that the thing we devised has the villagers clamoring for its demise”
Michael Moreci and Nathan Gooden (along with guest artist Gui Balbi, colorist Fabi Marques, and letterer Jim Campbell) keep cranking out volumes of Barbaric, and they keep being wildly fun, so I’m going to keep buying them! 
This is from Vault Comics, it’s $24.99, and it’s 134 pages long.
As I’ve mentioned before with regard to Barbaric, I tend to forget what’s going on between trades, which isn’t a bad thing, necessarily (I’m old and feeble, so my memory isn’t what it used to be), it’s just a fact. All I know is that Owen the Barbarian has a talking axe who likes to drink the blood of the people Owen kills, and he really likes drinking blood. Owen is cursed, he doesn’t know why his axe talks, and he kills a lot of people. Other people have come into the book and left the book, and Moreci has done a good job with the world-building. So it is in this volume, as Owen, Soren (who’s been with him for most of the book), and Toro (the mystery-solving priapic fawn) are heading to Soren’s hometown to figure out what’s going on with her curse, which is linked to why Axe is sentient. They meet some dude from the village who tells them that it’s under siege from creepy monsters, which sucks. He also tells them that the villagers have embraced a kind of Christianity and they don’t really talk about witches anymore, so Soren won’t be particularly welcome (and he’s right — she’s not). However, none of the villagers are really good fighters, so they can’t really do anything about the monsters, but luckily for them, the monsters are connected to the curse, so Owen, Soren, and Toro head out to kill them and find out what they’re protecting. They end up facing off against old enemies, including the Black Knight and Flail, another talking weapon, and they hook up with some of their old allies, and there’s a lot of killing, as you might expect. 
We learn a bit about what the sentient weapons really are, which is nice, but there are still a lot of questions about what’s going on. Moreci ends it a bit abruptly, as he’s clearly setting up the next arc (and possibly the last one?), which means he can’t have too much of a decent resolution. The Black Knight one-shot is interesting, as Owen doesn’t show up in it, but some of his friends do. It’s about how Flail ended up with the knight, and it’s actually fairly clever. I wonder how it will tie into the larger story, because it does feel a tiny bit like they were filling out the trade because they didn’t want to have a smaller one at a lower price point. Yes, I’m cynical. Sue me.
As always, I enjoy this comic, mainly because Moreci just powers through a bloody plot without worrying too much about ancillary things. Sure, we get some character history on the fly, and it’s certainly welcome, but Moreci doesn’t worry too much about it. Each character has interesting and unique personalities, and Moreci manages to cram a lot of humor into the book, as well, which does help alleviate the rage and gore that the characters drown in occasionally. Even minor characters like the blacksmith’s son who gets them into the village in the first place has some fun personality traits — Moreci shows how noble he is despite his pedigree, and also how woefully unprepared he is for battle, because of course he would be. The villains are interesting, too, as they are villainous, but they’re not completely thuggish — they engage with the heroes, because they know them better than some other villains, and Moreci does a nice job making them a bit more three-dimensional than you might expect in a sword-‘n’-sorcery story. 
As much as Moreci sticks to the script of a generic s-‘n’-s comic, he gives us some nifty twists that make Barbaric fun.
I’m glad Gooden (who, as far as I know, is one of the creative minds behind Vault Comics itself) remains the artist, because Gooden is very good, and he does really nice work on the book. He just does a really nice job making a sentient axe with an actual face not look as ridiculous as it sounds, and, in general, his facial expressions — which is important in a quasi-satirical book like this — are really good. His designs continue to be very cool — sure, the monsters look like they were imported from the Vin Diesel/Radha Mitchell classic Pitch Black, but it’s still a cool design — and he’s very good at the action scenes, of which there are many. Baldi has a similar style — his line is slightly thinner than Gooden’s, and there’s a bit more use of digital tricks — and his work on the Black Knight special fits the “Barbaric” aesthetic quite nicely. The book always looks really nice, and I’m glad that the creative team has stuck together for the entire run.
I sense that the series is coming to an end, possibly in the next series or possibly the one after that. It just feels like Moreci is moving us toward a conclusion, as Owen has learned quite a bit about his curse and it seems like he’s running out of enemies. We shall see. I will be here for it, however, because this is just a fun comic!
Rating: ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ½ ☆ ☆
