Corpse Knight #1 // Review
It’s 1429. France. The Hundred Years’ War continues. Murder, sickness and starvation plague the land. There’s a girl there somewhere in the French countryside. She is being trained to use a bow by her father. She’s frustrated. It’s an awkward weapon. Why not just learn to use a sword instead? He tells her that a sword is heavy and inelegant. That a sword lacks the finesse of a bow and arrow. The girl has much to learn in Corpse Knight #1. Writer Michael Chaves and artist Matthew Roberts are joined by colorist Rico Renzi in a promising opening to a new series.
The girl’s father motions her to be quiet. He hears something. He’s going to tell her to get on the back of the horse when he gives the word. Cross the river as quickly as possible and don’t look back. It’s all so sudden. Then an arrow nearly hits her in the face. Would have likely killed her had it not been for her father’s quick reflexes. It hit him in the hand. He’s in pain, but she knows that she needs to go as quickly as possible...even as her father’s back fills-up with over half a dozen arrows.
Chaves delivers a fast-paced opening to a period action drama. There is a whole lot of time to set things up before firing them off. The relationship between father and daughter needs to be very, very clearly defined very, very quickly. After all, things are going to have to happen with great haste in order to launch the adventure away. It needs to be launched. Chaves brilliantly nails, a very sharply rendered emotional connection between father and daughter that is able to hold it together, even as everything falls apart by issue’s end.
Speed. Danger. Anger. Frustration. Emotion comes across strikingly well under the power of Renzi’s visuals. There are a few tender moments that are brought to the page here and there. The power of emotion is particularly strong when those tender moments are torn under by powerful explosions of action. And though there is some sense of pel that some kind of magic outside the periphery of the center of the panel, the bulk of the first issue is really focused in on a very earthbound kind of historical action drama. Renzi does an impressive job of bringing it to the page in a way that feels appealingly ominous.
There's somebody sort of shadow that seems to be crawling around the edges of the story. Very much a historical horror feel to the series, but the most supernatural elements of this have yet to completely emerge as of the end of the first issue. It's clearly there, though. And so having had an opportunity to really ground the series in a very realistic, first issue, it'll be interesting to see where it moves as the series progresses. Give them the nature of what happened over the course of the first issue it's entirely possible that things could get very fantastic very quickly.
