Review time! with ‘Dark One’

“So he went inside there to take on what he found, but he never escaped them, for who can escape what he desires”

Technically, this is Brandon Sanderson‘s Dark One, but I really dislike that kind of designation, so I’ll mention it, but not because I dig it. Vault Comics bring this to us, with Jackson Lanzing and Collin Kelly adapting the story by Sanderson (it doesn’t appear to be from one of his novels, but an original idea that Lanzing and Kelly are running with), Nathan Gooden drawing, Kurt Michael Russell coloring, with lettering by AndWorld Design. It’s a fantasy book!

The book begins with a battle, and we think it’s going to hit all the notes of a boilerplate fantasy story. The bad guys are winning, an evil dude is about to kill his loyal companion, presumably to unleash some dark magic, and then we cut to the flashback that will explain it all. In this case, there’s a minor twist, as the cut is to present-day New York, but we’ve seen stories like this before, too, where someone from our world goes to another one and becomes a hero. In this case, it’s a young guy named Paul, who is telling his psychiatrist about the weird stuff in his life but doesn’t want to tell him about the ghost girl who haunts him and claims she’s his sister, even though he insists he’s never had a sister. Again, nothing too surprising here. Paul’s mother is a high-priced attorney whose firm assigns her to a serial-killer case, and we learn that her husband – who’s absent – is a sore spot for her. So that’s the set-up.

Even when we return to the fantasy world, things remain standard (I realize I’m not selling this well, but bear with me). There’s a king, a warrior training a younger warrior, a prophecy about the “Dark One,” and a narrative cycle about the rise and fall of evil that everyone seems aware of, which is the first nice twist to things. Eventually, of course, the “real world” and the fantasy world intersect, and Paul is transported there, where he finds out … that he’s the “Dark One.” That’s the big twist, and far as big twists go, it’s not bad. It’s not unique, of course (Image’s Birthright has been mining the same territory for a while now, to think of just one example), but it’s pretty good. Paul discovers this slowly, with the help of the king’s daughter, Feotora, whom we naturally expect to be his love interest as she comes to realize he’s not that bad. Feotora, however, isn’t quite as good as she appears to be, adding another nice dimension to the proceedings. Paul, of course, doesn’t want to be the bad guy, and he struggles mightily against it. Even early in the book, we can see kind of where this is going, but the writers do a nice job not making it too obvious. The most interesting part of the book is this idea of “narrative,” and that our lives are pre-ordained. Paul, naturally, doesn’t believe this, and that’s why he makes a good “Dark One,” because he doesn’t want to fit into this pre-arranged role, so he fights against it, which in the eyes of the “good guys,” makes him evil. It’s a nice comment on how we live our lives, based partly on “narrative,” where things that don’t fit are rejected and demonized. This plays into his mother’s case, too, because of course that’s connected, and how the killer sees himself and what he thinks he has to do to break the story. It’s a nice parallel to what Paul is going through. Lanzing and Kelly do a nice job with Paul and Feotora, as well as the other characters in the book, as they take standard fantasy tropes and get into why they’re that way a bit, which makes the book more interesting. It follows the “rules” of fantasy to a good degree, but there’s nothing wrong with that, and the changes to the tropes are well done.

Gooden is a good artist who doesn’t draw nearly as much as he should, so it’s nice to see him do a big, thick book like this. His work on this book puts me in mind of a slightly less angular Brian Stelfreeze, and his thick, lush line and beautiful use of spot blacks works very well when paired with Russell’s colors, which aren’t murky and therefore allow the art to pop a bit more even when Gooden uses a lot of black. Mirandus is a pretty good realized world – we don’t just see the throne room and vague backgrounds, but ruins of past glories, a nice palace complex, and the wrecked Dark One’s castle, which Paul gets about restoring. His characters are interesting because they don’t necessarily look like fantasy characters (except the old king, who’s right out of central casting) – the old warrior who attends the king is a nice touch once you realize who he is. Paul isn’t a big dude, so he looks the part of a reluctant hero who’s in over his head, and it makes his “growing into” the role well done. Gooden’s fight scenes are a bit busy, and a bit cramped given what’s supposed to be the scope of them, but his fluid style makes the individual panels nice to look at even if the storytelling falters just a bit (someone gets killed and we don’t know about it until a few pages later, when a character actually confirms it). The important part of the book, of course, is Paul’s journey, and Gooden does a good job with that, showing a relatively meek person figuring out how to be a warrior, even if it is a “dark” one.

This is “volume one,” because of course it is, but it does tell a relatively self-contained story. It ends with a decent if not surprising twist, but while that sets up future volumes, it doesn’t cut off in the middle of the story. So I imagine they’re hard at work on the next one, but again, if you get this one, you will get a fairly complete tale. It’s a fairly decent take on fantasy, and while other people are doing the same kinds of things, there’s nothing wrong with mixing it up a bit to get different ideas about fantast stories. As always, I’ve linked to this below, and if you shop with that link, no matter what you get, we get a little bit of that. So check this out if you’re interested!

Rating: ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ½ ☆ ☆