Mythstalkers #4 Review

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Reviewer: Manolis Vamvounis
Story title: The Labyrinth, Part Four of Four-“What Your People Call Labyrinth, My People Call Maze”

Written by: Douglass Barre
Art and coloured by: Jiro
Lettered by: Quantum FX
Editor: N/A
Publisher: Image Comics

This is the book championed by its fans as the heir apparent of League of Extraordinary Gentlemen.

Nah, don’t think so!

I think I’ll start you off with the more raunchy bits of the review. Let’s look at the really bad aspects of the book, the art.

The artist, ‘Jiro’, is a newcomer in the comics industry, and in my oh-so-humble (no, really!) opinion, he is not someone who is ready for professional work. Yet, here he is, handling the pencilling, inking and colouring chores of the comic. The results are painful to the eye. Anatomic blunders, characters switching places from panel to panel, pages seemingly coloured directly from the thumbnails, no consistency in the rendition of the faces and the frequent use of sloppy colour gradients in the place of actual backgrounds. If you are drawing a story set in Greece, go through the bother of looking up some references of locales and architecture.

Which brings us to the writing. I had expected more from Douglass Barre, after the rave reviews I had read for his work on other Image projects. There is nothing fundamentally ‘wrong’ about the writing (I’m not going on another rant like in the previous paragraph, there’s no reason for that here), but I have a few gripes from older issues. The main reason I picked this series in particular, instead of Barre’s other Image work, was that it was set in Greece (where I come from incidentally). I don’t consider Barre put in enough effort in his research on Greece, something that I think is expected of him, since he is doing such a location-specific story. More specifically, in issue 2 the characters set out from Iraklion to go to the ruins of Knossos. By boat. To go from a town near the sea, to a location 30 minutes away, which isn’t even near the sea. And on top of that one of the characters complains about travelling by sea, when he has probably spent the last 2 days on sea, in order to arrive at Crete… Always remember, Google is your friend. -sigh-

You’re probably all scratching your heads, what is he going on about? Let’s take a moment to look what the story is about (yeah, I know “NOW, he remembers the concept of the title?”). Mythstalkers follows the exploits of the Society for Cryptozoological Research in the year 1893. Basically they travel around the world and chase (or rather eradicate, if their current track record is taken into consideration) big ugly, (and garishly drawn) mythological creatures. In this first storyline, they’ve uncovered (through peculiar deductions and decryptions) a map to the Labyrinth of Knossos, in Crete, Greece, and have set off to capture themselves a Minotaur (Couldn’t they have just bought a map to Knossos from a newsagent? The Labyrinth of Knossos is the actual palace, with many winding ways and stairs, and it has been unearthed many centuries now… I’m expecting Sydney Fox to jump from the page any moment now). They eventually arrive in the labyrinth, after encounters with all sort of unrelated mythological paraphernalia, and are faced with a rabid pack of Minotaurs. That’s where this issue picks up from, and where things really improve by about 200% story-wise from the previous issues. The Minotaurs are dealt with in an impressive and unexpected way, and the team picks up the pieces (literally) and heads back home, trying to smuggle in their mythological cargo, in a delightful game of diversion.

The saving grace of this book is clearly the assembled cast. A unique blend of characters, each with distinct psychological traits, different agendas and motivations, and varied sets of beliefs. In this ‘team’, Barre has mixed cunning with naive, pacifist with trigger-happy, mastermind with impulsive, believer with sceptic and scandalous with restrained. I plan to stick around to see the fireworks fly.

ah, the good old Dr Manolis, the original comics Greek. He's been at this for sometime. he was there when the Comics Nexus was founded, he even gave it its name, he even used to run it for a couple of years. he's been writing about comics, geeking out incessantly and interviewing busier people than himself for over ten years now and has no intention of stopping anytime soon.