D’Orc #6 // Review
He is the stuff of legend and Fate is forcing him to watch his own conception. (Sadly: that’s not a metaphor or anything. Fate is this cool-looking pinkish-bluish-whitish entity. He’s riding it as it gives him a tour of the battlefield on which he was conceived...while he was being conceived.) Things don’t get any less weird in D’Orc #6. Writer/artist Brett Bean continues a deeply enjoyable sword and sorcery fantasy comedy serial. D’Orcs...uh...origin is revealed before he’s given an opportunity to decide his own fate in one of the more enjoyable issues on the comic rack so far this month.
Fate is telling D’Orc that it’s really up to him. He’s in charge of his own destiny. (Most people are too stupid to realize that this is the case.) D’Orc can choose his own path and deal with the consequences. And whatever D’Orc decides to do...well...Fate’s just going to have a fun time watching how it all plays-out. Meanwhile, outside of the magical crystal that serves as his prison, The Bone Witch, the ghost chicken and D’Orc’s enchanted shield are on the run from a dwarf that even now threatens to kill him to serve the forces of light.
It happened to Dave Sim’s Cerebus on the moon back in the mid-1980s. It happens to D’Orc in a magic crystal right in the middle of this summer. There’s that moment when a fantasy hero runs into a being of tremendous wisdom and certain things are revealed about the nature of the past and the nature of the future. All too often, beings of infinite wisdom in sci-fi and fantasy come across as being cold, stuffy and inhuman. Bean’s vision of Fate is brilliant. It’s weird. It’s whimsical. And it’s got a really, really weird sense of humor. (That pretty much sums-up EXACTLY what fate is.)
Bean finds a clever fusion of different visual elements. It can be so very, very difficult to manage an art style that needs to blend drama and weird comedy in equal measure. Bean’s exaggerated drama and cartoonish action deliver a well-balanced mood to the page that still manages to look really, really cool while it’s looking really, really silly. (Not many people can manage that kind of balance. Bean can.)
The big reveal at the end of the issue HAS been hinted at a little bit here and there. The fact that it’s predictable is actually really reassuring. Bean has been building a fantasy world with clever bits of logic and balance that are an endless amount of fun to get into. Bean puts down a lot of backstory in the sixth issue of the series, but there are a lot of cool, little details around the edges of everything as well. With any luck, Bean will keep doing the series just long enough to reveal what a “Trauma Llama” is. (That sounds like it could be a lot of fun.)
