Reviews
Reviews of 1 book and 4 comics.
Kismet by Watts Martin.
The first full-length novel by long-time short story and novella author Watts Martin, Kismet could best be described as social SF with elements of hard SF. It takes place in a world of space ships controlled by AIs, city-sized habitats scattered through the solar system, and humans transformed into animal-form ‘totemics.’ But the plot could be taken from today, with fears of terrorism, anti-totemic sentiment from ‘cisform’ humans, estranged siblings and children trying to deal with the legacy of a famous parent.
Gail, a young female rat totemic, inadvertently gets on the wrong side of a powerful corporation during what should be a routine salvage operation, and soon finds herself, her friends and her adopted sister drawn into a far-reaching conspiracy.
“Ripped from today’s headlines” is kind of a cliché`, but if you replace ‘totemic’ with ‘transgender,’ the things the totemic characters deal with will seem eerily familiar to contemporary readers. Referring to unaltered humans a ‘cisform’ just drives it home (in a way that term is a bit too current and will date the book. In a few hundred years I’m pretty sure there will be another term in use that means the same thing.)
The first half of the book has a lot of discussion about totemic rights between Gail, her friend Ansel the fox totemic, her wolf totemic sister and a human law enforcement officer. Gail’s mother, a famous totemic rights activist who was killed by a terrorist’s bomb, makes Gail both a rallying point and an object of hatred, depending on which side someone is on. Her trying to deal with that legacy is one of the themes that run through the story.
While the action does pick up during the latter part of the book, a lot of the story is devoted to Gail’s personal and professional struggles, speculations on corporate motivations as well as discussion about problems and discrimination faced by totemics.
I had no problem with the prose, although the choice of some terms and names was puzzling. I already mentioned that ‘cisform’ may quickly be outdated, but I honestly had a lot more trouble with the names of the two big corporations: Keces and Quanata. Why would anyone name their company something that’s one letter off from ‘feces?” That’s what I saw every time I saw the word. And Quanta is very close to the famous Austalian airline Qantas, which was also distracting because I kept thinking the characters were talking about the airline.
Of course, other people’s mileage may vary on how distracting they might find the names. This story is definitely not the nasty dystopian SF world that seems so common now, and will appeal not only to furry readers but those interested in a SF take on contemporary social issues.
Here I’ll be reviewing 4 current furry comics. Most of my heavy critiquing is on the art, since that's what I actually have a background in, but beyond all that I hope to alert people to comics they might not know about otherwise.
Beyond the Western Deep, 2 hardcopy volumes (so far), ongoing internet series. Alex Kain (W) and Rachel Bennet (A). The online strip has a separate side- story arc with art by Jerome Jacinto, which hasn’t been collected in book form yet, so I won’t be covering that here.
Published by Action Lab press, Beyond the Western Deep is presented in two very slick full-color graphic novels of 79 and 96 pages respectively. The story is nothing groundbreaking-set in a familiar medieval world of castles, kings, swords and northern barbarians, an uneasy truce between hostile factions is about to be broken. The main characters are young (teenage?) red squirrel Quin & his otter friend Dak, who live in the forest kingdom of Sunsgrove (composed of otters and squirrels, naturally!) They’re accompanying the Dak’s father to a border castle belonging to the militaristic Canin (wolves), which are Sunsgrove’s allies by treaty, even if they don’t really act like it in person. The other main players are the Ermehn (weasels), the Canin’s traditional enemy exiled to the northern wastes. There’s also desert foxes, sea-going ferrets and wild cats, but they don’t play a part in these first two volumes.
Nothing much happens in the first volume beyond introducing the main characters and the setting. Volume 2 introduces the Canin, more background history, and there’s a big battle. They’re both fast, easy reads. But at a total of 175 pages, that’s not a lot of story covered for the amount of pages. Online volume 3 is being released at one page a week.
There’s a legend I read once: High up in the North in the land called Svithjod, there stands a rock. It is a hundred miles high and a hundred miles wide. Once every thousand years a little bird comes to this rock to sharpen its beak.
When the rock has thus been worn away to the ground, then a single moment of eternity will have gone by.
Keep that tale in mind when thinking about trying to follow Beyond the Western Deep at one page a week. Because that’s what it feels like. “Glacial” doesn’t begin to describe it.
On the other hand, I do have good things to say about the art. I’ll admit I’m partial to animation-style character designs and artwork, which drew me to the series in the first place (it sure wasn’t the blazingly exciting storyline.) The art is very clean, bright and easy to follow, and generally the layouts are good. My only major complaint is the Ermehn all look too much alike, and you need to study the tribal markings and clothing to tell them apart. I've also heard complaints from a couple of other people that all the characters had the same type of face and mouth regardless of species, but honestly that didn’t bother me. Another comic I’m covering here (Autumnlands) the animal characters look radically different from each other, and then I hear complaints that they all look too ugly. If the reader can easily tell a squirrel from an otter from a wolf, then they can have the same type of mouth as far as I’m concerned.
I’m not sure how many volumes the story is supposed to last, and given the abysmal track record of webcomics actually finishing anything, I’m not going to hold my breath. If I could give the creators one piece of advice it would be this-for the love of God, pick up the story pace so there’s a snowball’s chance in hell of finishing it before that little bird wears down that mountain.
Dreamkeepers 4 volumes (so far), art and story by Dave & Liz Lillie (there’s no breakdown about who does what, so for purposes of this discussion I’ll just be referring to the creators as “them.”)
I already reviewed the first two volumes some time back, but two more have been released since then, and for this discussion I’m going to be taking a different track than a straightforward review.
I’ll lead off by saying that they’ve done a remarkable thing with this series so far, producing 4 full-color volumes of very high-quality work. They’ve been relentless promoting it online, with multiple Kickstarters, an elaborate website, extensive involvement of fans, cross-posting on different galleries, creating a card game based on the comics, running side stories about the characters, attending conventions, and basically working their asses off to promote the book.
(especially compared to myself, whose idea of promotion is to mention on FA and Facebook I’m going to have a new book out soon, and maybe, if I’m feeling really ambitious, posting a couple of pages from it.)
Bonus points for the series include it being an unusual fantasy, non-pornographic, and steering clear of pandering towards the LGBT audience that seems to be the backbone of most current furry books and comics. The art style and character designs are unique and instantly recognizable, a welcome change from the vague anime-type designs or hyper-realism that are currently predominating.
So with all those things going for it, why do I find the comic unreadable?
I’ve studied it and thought about it, compared it to other books that I found easy to read and follow, and finally came up with some ideas.
#1: Each page is way, way too busy and crowded, making it impossible to take in what’s going on at a glance. For some of the pages you practically need a magnifying glass to see what’s happening. This is exacerbated by the printing in some scenes, which comes out so dark you literally can’t see what’s going on. A lot of the pages are crammed with dialogue and a bunch of characters in each panel, so the reader has no idea what to focus on. Even when there's not tons of characters in each panel, there's invariably a minutely detailed background where it's work to pick out the characters and what they're doing. The few times the action focuses of one or two characters and each panel isn’t cluttered with super-detailed backgrounds, the action becomes much easier to follow.
This brings up a problem I see over and over again in these ambitious graphic novels out of furry fandom-it’s obvious when the creators don’t read comics, haven't studied the classic how-to books on the art of comics, and haven’t spent a lot (or any) time doing comics before launching their magnum opus. If you spend years reading and practicing comics, eventually you learn what does and doesn’t work, and that there’s reasons the pro artists lay out pages a certain way.
#2: There are too many characters. Oh God are there too many characters. This results in half a dozen different scenes with different characters that need to be kept track of per book, and often switching in the middle of a page. Eventually I gave up trying to figure out who was who, who was on what side and what their relationship (if any) to the other characters were. As soon as I’d sort of figured out what was going on, there’d be another scene switch with 10 new characters to keep track of in an entirely separate location. The one good thing I can say is the characters all do look different, even if I don't know who they are and what they're doing. At the very least provide a dramatis personae with notes about the characters in each book.
#3: The story is unnecessarily convoluted. There is a reason editors exist. There’s a lot going on here that doesn’t seem to advance the plot much, and just muddies the waters. Of course, action with no advancement is still preferable to some of the comics I’ve seen where the characters just sit around and talk for page after page.
And despite all this, I’ll still get volume #5 when it comes out. Because, you know, I do like looking at the pretty pictures.
Animosity, Marguerte Bennet (W) & Rafael DeLatorre (A)
This comic is put out by a ‘mainstream’ comic publisher (albeit a very small one.) It’s one of five things I’ve read in recent years with the same premise-animals inexplicably develop sentience overnight. (two are books, Mort(e) and The Awareness, and three are comics, Elmer, Animosity and Squarriors)
So far there’s been 5 issues, along with a 1-shot series with a different artist. It follows a girl, Jesse, and her bloodhound Sandor. The first issue jumps right into the action, with the animals suddenly becoming sentient and gaining speech and (of course) immediately turning on humanity. Jesse, her parents and Sandor struggle to survive the initial chaos in the first couple of issues. Then the story switches to a road trip with Sandor escorting Jesse across the country in an attempt to find her half-brother in California.
The series does address some of the issues that would come up-mainly about finding food to feed everyone when all prey animals are suddenly intelligent. The obvious solution (which happens in Mort(e) ) is for the animals to start eating the very abundant humans, but I guess they didn’t want to turn this into a Walking Dead-type comic. Other than a mention of some humans raising soybeans for protein, we’re not really sure what the predators eat. There’s also a brief mention of trying to get both human and animal populations within sustainable limits, but that is never resolved.
Issue #2 has an intriguing scene showing a ‘free market’ in Central Park where chickens sell their eggs, cows their milk, and donkeys rent out their transportation services. But that cooperation vanishes into anarchy by the end of the issue, setting the stage for the next few chapters.
Overall the writing is decent, except for a very odd story skip. (spoilers ahoy!!)
At the end of issue #2 Sandor is nearly beaten to death by Jesse’s father. Then the scene abruptly switches a year ahead, with a fully recovered Sandor leading Jesse out of a ruined city, after both her parents are dead. The reader has no idea how Sandor recovered from his beating, and what happened to Jesse’s parents. At least spare the reader a short caption explaining what happened!
The art has the major problem that always seems to come up when a non-furry publisher does a comic with animals-the artist is great at drawing humans, but can’t draw decent animals. The animals are barely passable, and most good furry artists could draw rings around him. It’s always frustrating when what could be a very good book gets dragged down by substandard animal art. There’s also some weird animal anatomy (the koala with a gun, forgetting koalas have those oddly shaped front hands), and the deer with grenades on his antlers (what exactly is he going to do with them? It’s not like he can pull the pin and throw it!) A lot of the animals in the “Animilitary” wear steel-jawed traps to give them extra biting power, but those traps were clearly drawn with no references at all and only vaguely resemble actual steel-jaw traps.
The animal art is even worse in the side-story series (called Animosity: The Rise), and the humans in that don’t look great either.
Overall I give the series a B, with the crappy animal drawings and the occasionally disjointed story pushing it down. I’ll keep getting it, though, because I do give them an A for effort. Not sure about The Rise, however. The art in that is so bad…
The Autumnlands volume 2: Woodland Creatures Kurt Busiek (W) and Benjamin Dewey (A)
I reviewed the first volume of this last year (I think) but I’m including this here as an example of a comic where everything comes together-a veteran writer who knows how to write and pace a comic, and an excellent artist who can draw both humans and a variety of animal characters.
Some furry fans may find the animal characters a little too realistically drawn (i.e. not the beautiful idealized furries that are de rigueur in most furry art) but (for me at least) they integrate well into the style of the book and I don’t have a problem with them not looking like drop-dead gorgeous models. Maybe one day I’ll review Grandville, where all the characters, even the ones who are supposed to be attractive, are aggressively ugly.
The story picks up right where the first volume left off, following the teenage bull terrier Dusty and the human Learoyd (a computer augmented soldier from the near future magiked into Dusty’s far-future world in the previous volume). Where volume 1 had a well-defined goal and story arc, volume 2 is a little more nebulous. In addition to Dusty’s self-appointed duty of being the Learoyd’s companion and guide in the Autumnlands, he also wants to find out why magical energy (“hastas”) is slowly draining away, and hopefully restore it. Learoyd just wants to find out why he’s there, and maybe find out how to get back, but doesn’t seem to have any plan for that other than start walking and see what they find.
What they find includes a land slowly being poisoned, hostile mountain goats, friendly sheep, mutated monsters, ancient living statues, and a mysterious human woman with god-like abilities. Volume 2 concludes the story arc about the poisoned land, but the larger questions are left for further installments.
There’s a surprising amount of (human) nudity in this. Learoyd manages to lose his clothes in both volumes, and the living statues have very large breasts and don’t wear tops. Learoyd also swears constantly. In contrast the furry characters seem the model of civility.
I have no real complaint with any of the art, beyond a few odd panels where the character’s faces suddenly go off-model. But in the great scheme of things those are very minor, and this title stands head and shoulders above the others as an example of both excellent writing and artwork.
Kismet by Watts Martin.
The first full-length novel by long-time short story and novella author Watts Martin, Kismet could best be described as social SF with elements of hard SF. It takes place in a world of space ships controlled by AIs, city-sized habitats scattered through the solar system, and humans transformed into animal-form ‘totemics.’ But the plot could be taken from today, with fears of terrorism, anti-totemic sentiment from ‘cisform’ humans, estranged siblings and children trying to deal with the legacy of a famous parent.
Gail, a young female rat totemic, inadvertently gets on the wrong side of a powerful corporation during what should be a routine salvage operation, and soon finds herself, her friends and her adopted sister drawn into a far-reaching conspiracy.
“Ripped from today’s headlines” is kind of a cliché`, but if you replace ‘totemic’ with ‘transgender,’ the things the totemic characters deal with will seem eerily familiar to contemporary readers. Referring to unaltered humans a ‘cisform’ just drives it home (in a way that term is a bit too current and will date the book. In a few hundred years I’m pretty sure there will be another term in use that means the same thing.)
The first half of the book has a lot of discussion about totemic rights between Gail, her friend Ansel the fox totemic, her wolf totemic sister and a human law enforcement officer. Gail’s mother, a famous totemic rights activist who was killed by a terrorist’s bomb, makes Gail both a rallying point and an object of hatred, depending on which side someone is on. Her trying to deal with that legacy is one of the themes that run through the story.
While the action does pick up during the latter part of the book, a lot of the story is devoted to Gail’s personal and professional struggles, speculations on corporate motivations as well as discussion about problems and discrimination faced by totemics.
I had no problem with the prose, although the choice of some terms and names was puzzling. I already mentioned that ‘cisform’ may quickly be outdated, but I honestly had a lot more trouble with the names of the two big corporations: Keces and Quanata. Why would anyone name their company something that’s one letter off from ‘feces?” That’s what I saw every time I saw the word. And Quanta is very close to the famous Austalian airline Qantas, which was also distracting because I kept thinking the characters were talking about the airline.
Of course, other people’s mileage may vary on how distracting they might find the names. This story is definitely not the nasty dystopian SF world that seems so common now, and will appeal not only to furry readers but those interested in a SF take on contemporary social issues.
Here I’ll be reviewing 4 current furry comics. Most of my heavy critiquing is on the art, since that's what I actually have a background in, but beyond all that I hope to alert people to comics they might not know about otherwise.
Beyond the Western Deep, 2 hardcopy volumes (so far), ongoing internet series. Alex Kain (W) and Rachel Bennet (A). The online strip has a separate side- story arc with art by Jerome Jacinto, which hasn’t been collected in book form yet, so I won’t be covering that here.
Published by Action Lab press, Beyond the Western Deep is presented in two very slick full-color graphic novels of 79 and 96 pages respectively. The story is nothing groundbreaking-set in a familiar medieval world of castles, kings, swords and northern barbarians, an uneasy truce between hostile factions is about to be broken. The main characters are young (teenage?) red squirrel Quin & his otter friend Dak, who live in the forest kingdom of Sunsgrove (composed of otters and squirrels, naturally!) They’re accompanying the Dak’s father to a border castle belonging to the militaristic Canin (wolves), which are Sunsgrove’s allies by treaty, even if they don’t really act like it in person. The other main players are the Ermehn (weasels), the Canin’s traditional enemy exiled to the northern wastes. There’s also desert foxes, sea-going ferrets and wild cats, but they don’t play a part in these first two volumes.
Nothing much happens in the first volume beyond introducing the main characters and the setting. Volume 2 introduces the Canin, more background history, and there’s a big battle. They’re both fast, easy reads. But at a total of 175 pages, that’s not a lot of story covered for the amount of pages. Online volume 3 is being released at one page a week.
There’s a legend I read once: High up in the North in the land called Svithjod, there stands a rock. It is a hundred miles high and a hundred miles wide. Once every thousand years a little bird comes to this rock to sharpen its beak.
When the rock has thus been worn away to the ground, then a single moment of eternity will have gone by.
Keep that tale in mind when thinking about trying to follow Beyond the Western Deep at one page a week. Because that’s what it feels like. “Glacial” doesn’t begin to describe it.
On the other hand, I do have good things to say about the art. I’ll admit I’m partial to animation-style character designs and artwork, which drew me to the series in the first place (it sure wasn’t the blazingly exciting storyline.) The art is very clean, bright and easy to follow, and generally the layouts are good. My only major complaint is the Ermehn all look too much alike, and you need to study the tribal markings and clothing to tell them apart. I've also heard complaints from a couple of other people that all the characters had the same type of face and mouth regardless of species, but honestly that didn’t bother me. Another comic I’m covering here (Autumnlands) the animal characters look radically different from each other, and then I hear complaints that they all look too ugly. If the reader can easily tell a squirrel from an otter from a wolf, then they can have the same type of mouth as far as I’m concerned.
I’m not sure how many volumes the story is supposed to last, and given the abysmal track record of webcomics actually finishing anything, I’m not going to hold my breath. If I could give the creators one piece of advice it would be this-for the love of God, pick up the story pace so there’s a snowball’s chance in hell of finishing it before that little bird wears down that mountain.
Dreamkeepers 4 volumes (so far), art and story by Dave & Liz Lillie (there’s no breakdown about who does what, so for purposes of this discussion I’ll just be referring to the creators as “them.”)
I already reviewed the first two volumes some time back, but two more have been released since then, and for this discussion I’m going to be taking a different track than a straightforward review.
I’ll lead off by saying that they’ve done a remarkable thing with this series so far, producing 4 full-color volumes of very high-quality work. They’ve been relentless promoting it online, with multiple Kickstarters, an elaborate website, extensive involvement of fans, cross-posting on different galleries, creating a card game based on the comics, running side stories about the characters, attending conventions, and basically working their asses off to promote the book.
(especially compared to myself, whose idea of promotion is to mention on FA and Facebook I’m going to have a new book out soon, and maybe, if I’m feeling really ambitious, posting a couple of pages from it.)
Bonus points for the series include it being an unusual fantasy, non-pornographic, and steering clear of pandering towards the LGBT audience that seems to be the backbone of most current furry books and comics. The art style and character designs are unique and instantly recognizable, a welcome change from the vague anime-type designs or hyper-realism that are currently predominating.
So with all those things going for it, why do I find the comic unreadable?
I’ve studied it and thought about it, compared it to other books that I found easy to read and follow, and finally came up with some ideas.
#1: Each page is way, way too busy and crowded, making it impossible to take in what’s going on at a glance. For some of the pages you practically need a magnifying glass to see what’s happening. This is exacerbated by the printing in some scenes, which comes out so dark you literally can’t see what’s going on. A lot of the pages are crammed with dialogue and a bunch of characters in each panel, so the reader has no idea what to focus on. Even when there's not tons of characters in each panel, there's invariably a minutely detailed background where it's work to pick out the characters and what they're doing. The few times the action focuses of one or two characters and each panel isn’t cluttered with super-detailed backgrounds, the action becomes much easier to follow.
This brings up a problem I see over and over again in these ambitious graphic novels out of furry fandom-it’s obvious when the creators don’t read comics, haven't studied the classic how-to books on the art of comics, and haven’t spent a lot (or any) time doing comics before launching their magnum opus. If you spend years reading and practicing comics, eventually you learn what does and doesn’t work, and that there’s reasons the pro artists lay out pages a certain way.
#2: There are too many characters. Oh God are there too many characters. This results in half a dozen different scenes with different characters that need to be kept track of per book, and often switching in the middle of a page. Eventually I gave up trying to figure out who was who, who was on what side and what their relationship (if any) to the other characters were. As soon as I’d sort of figured out what was going on, there’d be another scene switch with 10 new characters to keep track of in an entirely separate location. The one good thing I can say is the characters all do look different, even if I don't know who they are and what they're doing. At the very least provide a dramatis personae with notes about the characters in each book.
#3: The story is unnecessarily convoluted. There is a reason editors exist. There’s a lot going on here that doesn’t seem to advance the plot much, and just muddies the waters. Of course, action with no advancement is still preferable to some of the comics I’ve seen where the characters just sit around and talk for page after page.
And despite all this, I’ll still get volume #5 when it comes out. Because, you know, I do like looking at the pretty pictures.
Animosity, Marguerte Bennet (W) & Rafael DeLatorre (A)
This comic is put out by a ‘mainstream’ comic publisher (albeit a very small one.) It’s one of five things I’ve read in recent years with the same premise-animals inexplicably develop sentience overnight. (two are books, Mort(e) and The Awareness, and three are comics, Elmer, Animosity and Squarriors)
So far there’s been 5 issues, along with a 1-shot series with a different artist. It follows a girl, Jesse, and her bloodhound Sandor. The first issue jumps right into the action, with the animals suddenly becoming sentient and gaining speech and (of course) immediately turning on humanity. Jesse, her parents and Sandor struggle to survive the initial chaos in the first couple of issues. Then the story switches to a road trip with Sandor escorting Jesse across the country in an attempt to find her half-brother in California.
The series does address some of the issues that would come up-mainly about finding food to feed everyone when all prey animals are suddenly intelligent. The obvious solution (which happens in Mort(e) ) is for the animals to start eating the very abundant humans, but I guess they didn’t want to turn this into a Walking Dead-type comic. Other than a mention of some humans raising soybeans for protein, we’re not really sure what the predators eat. There’s also a brief mention of trying to get both human and animal populations within sustainable limits, but that is never resolved.
Issue #2 has an intriguing scene showing a ‘free market’ in Central Park where chickens sell their eggs, cows their milk, and donkeys rent out their transportation services. But that cooperation vanishes into anarchy by the end of the issue, setting the stage for the next few chapters.
Overall the writing is decent, except for a very odd story skip. (spoilers ahoy!!)
At the end of issue #2 Sandor is nearly beaten to death by Jesse’s father. Then the scene abruptly switches a year ahead, with a fully recovered Sandor leading Jesse out of a ruined city, after both her parents are dead. The reader has no idea how Sandor recovered from his beating, and what happened to Jesse’s parents. At least spare the reader a short caption explaining what happened!
The art has the major problem that always seems to come up when a non-furry publisher does a comic with animals-the artist is great at drawing humans, but can’t draw decent animals. The animals are barely passable, and most good furry artists could draw rings around him. It’s always frustrating when what could be a very good book gets dragged down by substandard animal art. There’s also some weird animal anatomy (the koala with a gun, forgetting koalas have those oddly shaped front hands), and the deer with grenades on his antlers (what exactly is he going to do with them? It’s not like he can pull the pin and throw it!) A lot of the animals in the “Animilitary” wear steel-jawed traps to give them extra biting power, but those traps were clearly drawn with no references at all and only vaguely resemble actual steel-jaw traps.
The animal art is even worse in the side-story series (called Animosity: The Rise), and the humans in that don’t look great either.
Overall I give the series a B, with the crappy animal drawings and the occasionally disjointed story pushing it down. I’ll keep getting it, though, because I do give them an A for effort. Not sure about The Rise, however. The art in that is so bad…
The Autumnlands volume 2: Woodland Creatures Kurt Busiek (W) and Benjamin Dewey (A)
I reviewed the first volume of this last year (I think) but I’m including this here as an example of a comic where everything comes together-a veteran writer who knows how to write and pace a comic, and an excellent artist who can draw both humans and a variety of animal characters.
Some furry fans may find the animal characters a little too realistically drawn (i.e. not the beautiful idealized furries that are de rigueur in most furry art) but (for me at least) they integrate well into the style of the book and I don’t have a problem with them not looking like drop-dead gorgeous models. Maybe one day I’ll review Grandville, where all the characters, even the ones who are supposed to be attractive, are aggressively ugly.
The story picks up right where the first volume left off, following the teenage bull terrier Dusty and the human Learoyd (a computer augmented soldier from the near future magiked into Dusty’s far-future world in the previous volume). Where volume 1 had a well-defined goal and story arc, volume 2 is a little more nebulous. In addition to Dusty’s self-appointed duty of being the Learoyd’s companion and guide in the Autumnlands, he also wants to find out why magical energy (“hastas”) is slowly draining away, and hopefully restore it. Learoyd just wants to find out why he’s there, and maybe find out how to get back, but doesn’t seem to have any plan for that other than start walking and see what they find.
What they find includes a land slowly being poisoned, hostile mountain goats, friendly sheep, mutated monsters, ancient living statues, and a mysterious human woman with god-like abilities. Volume 2 concludes the story arc about the poisoned land, but the larger questions are left for further installments.
There’s a surprising amount of (human) nudity in this. Learoyd manages to lose his clothes in both volumes, and the living statues have very large breasts and don’t wear tops. Learoyd also swears constantly. In contrast the furry characters seem the model of civility.
I have no real complaint with any of the art, beyond a few odd panels where the character’s faces suddenly go off-model. But in the great scheme of things those are very minor, and this title stands head and shoulders above the others as an example of both excellent writing and artwork.