D’Orc #2 // Review
The lands of Sunderain have been caught-up in the brutality of a seemingly endless 1,000-year war between armies of light and darkness. One individual stands between both armies. Everyone is going to know who he is. Before he can introduce himself, though...he’s going to climb-up the sheer face of a cliff with an enchanted shield and a cadaver-fied chicken in D’Orc #2. Writer/artist Brett Bean and colorist Jean-Francois Beaulieu. continue a deeply enjoyable sword-and-sorcery fantasy drama. Bean continues to expand on the title character and the world he inhabits in another fun outing.
The little guy has more than a annoying shield and a dead chicken to accompany him up his scale of the mountain side. He's also got the incessant questioning of the undead head of the chickening question. It asks him the perfectly rational question of why he would be claiming so high. And what with it being the case that both light and darkness want him dead, he would really prefer to remain alive. And that would happen to involve possibly being safe at the top of the tallest mountain. It's a perfectly logical strategy. However, he's going to find out that survival is a lot more complicated than simply avoiding people.
Bean manages a very sophisticated, little social satire with this particular issue. It suggests a great deal of depth that goes well beyond the surface adventure. And the surface adventure for what it is is actually a great deal of fun. Bean is fusing together or some really interesting science fiction and fantasy tropes in a way that feels fresh and new, even though every single aspect of it has been done to death 1 million times. The heart at the core of the series really is what keeps it animated. And the balance between the inner white and darkness of the title character keeps it all very emotionally connected.
Some of the visuals are fairly stunning. The climb up the cliff looks ridiculously perilous. The danger that the title character encounters, or once he gets up to the plateau on the top of the mountain has a richly dynamic field to it that looks distinctly unlike just about any other sword and sorcery action. And at the center of it all there's this little half or half dwarf carrying a very cool-looking shield. It's all so visually appealing.
In the future, it would be kind of nice to see stories play out that take longer than a single issue. But the single issue adventure format allows Bean an opportunity to introduce a lot of different elements to the page without getting bogged-down in long and tedious world-building. So many fantasy authors pamel, the page with so many different details. And that can be fun, but it has the tendency of tearing the narrator too far away from the center of page and panel. Bean is doing a remarkable job of both expanding the world of the series and maintaining a really enjoyable adventure in the foreground.
