CREDIT: Dynamite Comics
Rating: 3.5/5 – Solid Fantasy World-Building in This Debut Issue.
by ComicSpectrum EiC Bob Bretall.
If you’re a fan of fantasy, give the 1st issue of The Blood Queen a try. It might be a book that gets skipped on the stands because it looks so much like another of the “bad girl” comics focused on a busty protagonist with not a lot else. In this case, you can’t really judge the comic by it’s cover. Sure, the protagonist Elizabeth is an attractive young woman, but the story by Troy Brownfield is much more than just excuses to have Elizabeth posing around in various cleavage revealing outfits. Instead we get some really solid fantasy world building laced with political intrigue and some additional plot lines that are just below the surface and will come to fruition in later issues.
The art by Fritz Casas is solid, but not outstanding. Panels are generally lacking in background detail and the page layouts are pretty standard. The figures and faces are well executed, jazzing up the presentation of the pages would really kick the art up a notch.
Our heroine Elizabeth is established as a healer and she knows about blood magic, but blood magic seems to be generally regarded as dubious pursuit that has been banned. Elizabeth herself is kind of ambiguous, we don’t know from this issue whether she is going to end up being fully good, very evil, or somewhere in between. There are definitely some ulterior motives going on that we see the seeds of but are not fully played out in this issue. Overall this was a good first issue, it introduced a number of characters, the world our story is set in, as well as various points of conflict and story possibilities. This can go in any number of directions as the story develops and I’d be OK with any of them. I have some suspicions, but I’ll keep them to myself for now in the interests of remaining “spoiler free”. Ultimately this achieved the goal of a #1 issue, it got me to want to come back for #2.
Reviewed by: Bob Bretall
(bob@comicspectrum.com)
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