Kade: Sun of Perdition #1
Written by: Sean O’Reilly
Art by: Stjepan Sejic, Dheeraj Verma
Arcana Comics
I
listen to heavy metal music. And not the kind with the baggy khakis
and the backwards baseball caps, that channels the disaffected rage
and nihility of the white suburban middle class into ripped off Minor
Threat riffs and clumsily rapped vocals. No, I listen to the deranged
rantings of Norwegian D&D nerds, all kitted out in bullet belts
and spiked armlets, raging to the heavens about Tolkein's Ballad
of Tom Bombadil or some such nonsense. I'm used to people talking
themselves so seriously that white pancake makeup becomes a statement
of satanic misanthropy rather than a way to get laid at a Cher
concert. And still, still, I can't believe I'm supposed to
take Kade: Sun of Perdition seriously.
Kade:
Sun of Perdition is,
in essence, a cut plot line from Everquest in comics form,
but with more painful Anne Rice gravitas. Sometime during the Final
Fantasy-inspired Dark Ages, a man with remarkably fey black
metal makeup sells his soul to the devil in exchange for help killing
an unjust king. He has a child who grows up into a tall Glenn Danzig
with emo tattoos. This is Kade, a brooding fellow all the more sombre
because of his WWE wrestler name. Then, in a bizarrely
concise montage sequence, he dies, goes to hell, comes back, and
somehow gains a female Kade with equally pallid skin and black tribal
tattoos. Also, it's now taking place in the present. Then he kills a
priest, and some scary stuff happens that appears to be based on
early Slayer lyrics. We learn that there is a great evil coming, and
only Kade, his sidekick, and probably Buffy Summers can stop it.
Written
by Arcana comics editor/owner Sean O'Reilly, Kade is an
unpalatable mix of childish goth scribblings and stock fantasy
motifs. The art, by Stjepan Sejic and Dheeraj Verma, is exactly the
sort of thing you would expect from this sort of thing, all shadowed
figures and eyes glowing out of the murk. It's all too slick, glossy,
and Photoshopped, making everything look like a screen capture from a
video game. This causes the action to seem static instead of
investing the images with the fluidity an action/adventure title like
this needs. I supposed there's room in the market for this sort of
thing, as the occasional burst of Verotik comics would suggest, but
I'm not sure who it's supposed to appeal to. D&D fans tend to be
a little more literate than this, and fans of comics in general have
seen this sort of thing before. Maybe they're counting on the
international sales, once it gets translated into Norwegian.
Rating: 3 on 10
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