Robyn Hood: Dagon #1 // Review
There’s a guy standing a couple of blocks from the nearest diner. He’s holding one of those “End Is Near” signs. Only this guy’s different. When he asks, “Do you believe?” he’s talking about some god from the deep named Dagon. Robyn shrugs him off, but she’s going to run into the minions of a dark god in Robyn Hood: Dagon. Writer Joe Brusha offers another fun little outing into the supernatural shadows of New York with the aid of artist Alessio Mariani. Colorist Juan Manuel Rodriguez immerses the page in the murky sliminess of Robyn’s latest threat.
There’s something in the sewers beneath New York. Robyn’s dealt with a lot of weird things before, but this particular flavor of weird happens to involve fish-like humanoids with glowing eyes that attack on sight. Robyn isn’t facing the slimy monsters alone. She’s got an old acquaintance to help her out. This will be particularly useful: not everything that creeps in the shadows of Manhattan can be pierced with an arrow. There’s death in the heart of the city, and Robyn will need all the help that she can get. Gods older than time are returning. They’ve come to reclaim what they feel is theirs.
Brusha brings a lot to the page as Robyn teams up with a couple of different allies to face the Lovecraftian menace that’s set before her. Even 32 pages aren’t enough room to move around with the three characters without compromising some of the potential of the threat that they’re up against. By the time the action really gets going, it’s already more or less finished. The evil that Robyn is battling never had much of a chance to define itself beyond the basic B-movie horror level monsters. If Brusha were allowed a bit more time to develop the monsters, the story might be a lot more intriguing.
Mariani does a good job of moving the action across the page. The monsters in question seem solidly rendered, but there isn’t enough going on to make it feel terribly memorable. The creatures from the black lagoon are defeated pretty quickly. Then there’s a dragon-like monster. Mariani isn’t called on to do anything terribly interesting with the monsters...and he doesn’t. There’s great potential for novelty with monsters crawling around New York in a place removed from the Marvel and DC universes, but Mariani brings it all to the page in a disappointingly familiar style.
Through it all, Robyn continues to be a really appealing character. There’s a great deal of fun in an attractive Green Arrow woman who tangles with the supernatural on an urban American night. Robyn’s action-hero personality might not be all that distinguishable from a million other such characters, but Brusha manages to keep her feeling like her own person through yet another fun issue. Brusha and company would need to find something just a bit more distinct to live up to the potential of something truly original.
