The Karman Blade #3 // Review
There is a stranger who had been both a master and victim of various fates. He had come to the kingdom and taken one of the king's daughters for his wife. It was a moment of romance and Colonel ecstasy. But it was marked by the shadows of the darkness, which would come to haunt the stranger later on. The story of this find its way into The Karman Blade #3. Writer Darcy Van Poelgeest and artist Ian Bertram deliver an epic fantasy story featuring color by Matt Hollingsworth. There's a great degree of intensity in the story which feels quite well visually represented on the page.
It's inevitable that the stranger and one of the king's twin daughters would find them themselves with child. However, good fortune may stop there. It's not long before they find themselves losing not one but two children. Clearly there must be something wrong with this situation. Clearly something must be done about it. There are certain powerful forces that must be confronted if good fortune is to remain on the side of those who have found the right love to guide the nation. There's going to be a great danger in that confrontation.
Darcy Van Poelgeest finds a very deep poetry in and within a conflict that feels like it was pulled from a darker end of a fairytale. It's hard to stage epic fantasy in a way that feels like it's engaging in more contemporary anxieties and fantasies. Certainly there is something in the story that feels like it is engaging something deeper. However, it feels like it's just echoing things that have been told before on the page of commercial sword and sorcery fantasy novels, which stretched back into the early 20th century. To be sure there is much to be admired in the story. However, it feels like an echo of a shadow of something that's come before.
Bertram’s visual world feels very distinctive. Once again, the artist style is so very much pulled out of a strange intersection between fantasy and horror. And it is so distinctive to itself. The visuals feel potent and pleasantly strained while still managing a kind of deep and slightly disturbing for element not all of it is brilliantly modulated, though. Even moment, it's a great ecstasy to hit the page in a way that feels shadowed by horror. And not in a way that necessarily embraces the pleasure and the beauty that is meant to be brought to the page.
Though it may not be reaching forth from a place that's truly inspired, the overall feel of The Karman Blade is powerful and haunting. There's a lot going on in and with in it that feels fresh and original, even if the overall premise isn't. It's actually pretty rare that something this primal makes it to the kind of rack. Even cosmic level adventures featuring gods and goddesses rarely live up to the intensity of a tower that is brought to the page in The Karman Blade.
