Fire & Ice: Nekron #1 // Review
It’s not difficult to see what Cador saw in Thaleia. She was adventurous and dynamic. Maybe a little bit reckless. Cador’s appreciation of Thaleia may have been what she saw in him. His loyalty to the tribe of the Silvarri was irresistible. And so they were in love. And so they wed. And the story might have ended there had it not been for the invasion. Warriors had come on the backs of dragon hawks bringing fire. Taleia’s life was about to change forever, as chronicled in Fire & Ice: Nekron #1. Writer Sara Frazetta and artist Geof Isherwood deliver a one-shot prequel to the 1983 animated feature film Fire and Ice.
Cador had been taken along with the rest of the Slivarri. Thaleia what was the only one to survive. She had found about in the boat, had taken her northward. Where she ran across sisterhood of sorcerers. The power that she would find there would provide her the opportunity to enact revenge. It wasn't going to be easy, though. She would need to secure some sort of an army if she was going to be able to defeat those who had so easily wiped out her entire tribe.
Sara Frazetta crafts, some genuine poetry in the epic fantasy story. She does an admirable job of delivering a sympathetic and complicated prequel to the 1983 animated feature co-created by her father and animator Ralph Bakshi. Frazetta has the pacing down more or less perfect. This is no easy task given how much story she has to tell in a single volume. Theoretically, this one issue could've easily been adapted into more of a comfortable for issue miniseries. Nevertheless, Frazetta does a really good job of modulating the story with a great deal of poetry and quite a bit of nuance around the edges.
Isherwood has done better work elsewhere. Here he is definitely fusing his style with something that would be more adapted to the Frank Frazetta/Ralph Bakshi visual style of the original film. This is an admirable approach to rendering this particular story for the page. It kind of hampers his own artistic voice, though. That being said, it's solidly well executed art throughout. There may be a bit of a working this to it that makes it feel a bit lost in places, but on the whole it DOES follow Sara Frazetta’s pacing quite well.
Sara Frazetta has really done an excellent job of framing of kind of a complicated story in a very short frame of time. Some of the poetry of some of the dialogue and the narration are beautiful enough to make the entire issue worth reading even in the light of some of its shortcomings. She's got real talent as a writer that has a great deal of potential if she were to choose to explore it. So often it is the case that contemporary writers feel the need to temper the series end of fantasy with clever bits of humor here and there. This is perfectly fine and nothing to be ashamed of. But it is truly rare to see a script like Sara Frazetta’s that embraces everything on a total serious level that's still manages to be every bit as entertaining as anything written in a more contemporary style.
