Disney Villains: Maleficent #3 // Review
The dark sorceress has resurrected along dead warrior in hopes that he could help find a sword that she needs. It's kind of an awkward situation. The warrior isn't exactly in a position to be helping out. Maybe he doesn't want to. He does, however, want to talk about his joints. (Being dead is hard on the joints. Nobody ever talks about that...probably because they’re too busy being dead.) The sorceress has conjured a new headache for herself in Disney Villains: Maleficent #3. Writer Paulina Ganucheau and artist Theo Stultz continue a fun adventure for one of Disney’s most iconic villains.
It's not just a lack of willingness to find this sort in question. It's more than that. It's the fact that, being dead, the warrior in question doesn't really have anything to lose. And so if he doesn't necessarily want to help her out then he doesn't necessarily have to. She may be a powerful sorcerer, but she's not exactly an necromancer. She can't exactly command him to do anything he doesn't want. However, when she threatens a couple of other spirits and they happen to mention that she also needs the tears of a dragon, he's willing to help out. And it's going to be an adventure, so why not help her out?
Ganucheau finds an incredible amount of novelty in a story that would otherwise be very, very traditional. It's a traditional heroes journey, except that it happens to be being undertaken by a villain. And so there's kind of a fun element of that. But beyond that there really isn't much in the story that isn't very traditional to just about every fairytale or sword and sorcery story that's ever been told. The writer manages to keep it simple while also developing something that feels remarkably fresh. And she's able to do that without adding-in anything new that would clash with the genre. That’s very impressive.
It’s difficult to explain how or why Stultz’s approach to the visuals works as well as it does. Maybe it's something of the way. The panels are composed.. Maybe it's the overall layout of the page. Or maybe it's just the fact that there's so much personality coming off the page. Whatever it is, it isn't exactly reverent to this style of animation that would have introduced the character in Sleeping Beauty over half a century ago. There's just a delicious dream about it that definitely delivers the personality of the storyquite well.
Ganucheau doesn't remarkable job of delivering very memorable characters to the page with very little characterization. There really doesn't need to be all that much going on with respect to the plot in order for this particular writer to craft a character that feels remarkably memorable. They're only on the page for a very brief amount of time and they aren't exactly very complicated psycho emotionally or anything like that. They don't have a chance to be. Because the plot is not something that would allow for that. That being said, the writer is doing a remarkable job of crafting a tale with memorable character out of very traditional and otherwise largely forgettable story. It's an act of literary alchemy. And it's a lot of fun.
