Dark Ages #4
Dark Horse
Words: Dan Abnett
Pictures: I. N. J. Culbard

The best of both worlds.  Nope, not the Van Hagar song (though don’t get me wrong, I actually dig some Van Hagar and that song as well) but the best of some Sci-Fi and some Medieval knight action.  And it’s all done so damn well.  Hell, Giorgio A. Tsoukalos loves this book!  (You know,that crazy haired dude who is always talkin’ about aliens on that Ancient Aliens show.  Yeah, him.  You know he’s lovin’ this book. )

No matter how you feel about oddly quaffed TV folks, this is such an awesome book, and it just keeps getting better.  Every month Dan Abnett has more surprises for us and our intrepid band of knights as they continue to fight the clearly alien presence.  Our silent monks are a little less silent this issue, and a lot less monkish.  Seriously, WTF is up with those guys?  And young knight in training Martlet loses his hands… both of them.  And Lucifers’ vision at the end… damn.

And once again, the action is hot and heavy as the knight lay into the aliens yet again.  I.N.J Culbard is crushing it when it comes to the imagery in this book.  The aliens on the first page are just so damn cool looking.  He makes it very easy to imagine that if this is even close to what ancient aliens would have looked like, why they would have been revered as gods or feared as devils.  His pencils lend a validity to a very cool, and perhaps very plausible story.  (See Giorgio A. Tsoukalos for more on the plausibility angle.)

This slick blend of alien nano tech robottiness with medieval religious fervor meshes extremely well.  Both sides of that coin deal very much in faith and truth and the trail traveled between the two.  No matter how powerful science or technology is (in this case, the nano tech of the alien), faith is a mighty counter to this truth.  But without faith, it’s extremely hard to discover some truths.  We see our faithful knights struggle with this knew truth they can no longer deny.  And from that, a new kind of faith is slowly spawning.  Now, they are about to embark on a new mission of evangelism.

4 out 5 Shushing Monks