The Unchosen #3 // Review
It’s night Aida is running. She can’t maintain her momentum, though. They catch-up with her. They’re not trying to scre her. They’re not trying to kidnap her or anything like that. They just want to take to her about something in The Unchosen #3. Writer/artist David Marquez continues a coming-of-age fantasy that manages to flip a few tropes here and there and maintain it’s own distinct voice a few issues in.Color comes to the page courtesy of Marissa Louise. The fourth issue in the series may. still be bogged- down in world-building, but there’s quite a lot in it that feels fresh and distinct.
They’re telling her something that she might not want to hear. They’re saying that what she thinks she knows is wrong. It’s difficult to take that kind of news given what the school had told her. She was told that she was special. That she has a hidden power and that she alone can save the world from an unstoppable evil. The thing is: she’s not alone. They tell everyone that. It’s how they control people. It’s how they manipulated them. And maybe she’s ready to hear something different. Maybe she’s ready to hear the truth.
Marquez shifts things around an interesting ways. The chosen one who is destined to the sun champion who will save everyone. Save the universe. That's a tedious trope that has been circulating around high fantasy for a long time. It's kind of cool to see the darker end of that as it's used as a tool for control. It's very cool to see that develop. And the drama of being confronted with the possibility that things might not be what they seem? There's real drama in that.Marquez does a good job of developing for the page.
The drama that Marquez is rendering for the page feels power ful enough to carry the weight of his script...when the drama is right on the surface of the action. When his script is diving into plot background and world-building, the visual of it all DOES get a bit lost in the backstory. Through it all, Aida comes across as a very complex character, which is quite an accomplishment given the fact that she isn’t exactly in a totally active posture for the bulk of the issue. For the most part she’s just reacting to the sudden shift in understanding of who she is. That can be pretty powerful in a script, but it can be very, very difficult to make it work in the visual. Marquez does a fairly brathtaking job of conjuring subtle emotion to the page in facial expressions alone without exaggerating anything.
The “chosen one” end of the story really DID look like it was going to be profoundly dull until t his issue came along. Marquez does an excellent job of taking that trope and showing a truly dark side of it all in a dystopian vision of magic and the things that it can make people do.
