Monday, August 15, 2022

STARHENGE: DRAGON & THE BOAR - Review


 

So have you ever been working on something for half of your life or for decades on end? It’s your art/business/idea baby. You talk to people about it at parties in hushed tones. You tell the person you’re dating just enough about it to keep you looking interesting and mysterious but never enough for them to know what it’s actually about. Then one day somebody calls your bluff and says ‘I’ll pay for you to do this project’ and you go ‘Shit’. That’s what it seems like happened here. Image (the greatest comic book publisher on the planet right now) said ‘Liam we love your stuff waddya got?’ He pitched them some wacky superhero sanitation worker story, a non binary werewolf story, a Kabuki romance between two pigeons and then offhandedly mentioned this ‘The Dragon and the Boar’ they go ‘We love it! Do it!’ Oh boy.

 

Well, it looks great...for the most part. Thing is, I don’t know what the hell’s going on. One moment I’m looking at high school cutesy couple, the next some uppity medieval dude hunting Lord knows what, some robot queen sci-fi stuff and perhaps an allusion to “Dog Day Afternoon’ if I look hard enough. I once wrote a pilot with a writing partner that had three different time lines and it was an unmitigated disaster; great scenes and characters but I couldn’t pay you my life savings to have you explain to me what was going on.

 

That’s this comic book. Now, don’t get me wrong, there’s some good stuff in here. To be honest though I’m getting angrier at the book the longer I write this review. The bottom line of the story: Magic has gone missing and the evil AI is coming to wipe us out! Aahhhhhhhhh. Oh boy, Magic is missing again, haven’t we all been through this before? Where’s the Magic? Bring back the Magic, that inexorable spark of humanity that defeats machines. Let me tell you something, if AI remote accesses your Tesla and drives it any which way it desires all around Los Angeles all the pseudo Latin Potterish mumblings ain’t gonna turn it off.

 

Look, the magic went out of my dating life five years ago why don’t you send the digitally drawn hot cyber couple to play wing man/woman for me and help me get a date. I can take them to Whole Foods and finally get a cute girl in the prepared foods section to actually make eye contact with me. That would be a much easier comic book to follow than this tangled web of wackadoodlydoo. The Magic! The Magic is gone! Oy vey.

 

There was a moment when two of the sci-fi characters were about to bang and then we were taken to a call from Sci-Fi Mommy wired in a throne chair. After spending 5 bucks on this I think you needed to throw in some gratuitous sex. It’s gratuity for us buying this haphazard book. Gee, thanks for supporting my dream project here’s two robotic looking humans naked and banging each other. Then I can spend a minute or two looking at half boob/half machine nip and wonder if I'd be into it: definitely not...until after I play around with it for a minute or two or three or four; some privacy please? Yeah, the consistency is weird. Is it moving before I touch it? I wonder if it's emitting EMF? Would that mean it's an EMFipple?

 

After all is said and done, it’s still not a horrible book compared to anything Marvel and its Minions of Evil are putting out on the racks. It definitely checks the ‘What the hell Is going on here’ box. I think I’ll give this one more issue to at least attempt to explain that to me, otherwise down the dipsy dumpster you go.

 

Rating: 7.1

Verdict: Pull on Alert

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