Maybe it’s the story of a sixteenth-century girl who took down a massive demon boar with a single sword. Or maybe it’s the story of the story of that story. Or maybe it’s the story of a guy telling that story in a more contemporary era. Whatever it is, it’s definitely about storytelling winding around the storytellers as writer/artist Will Morris’s Gospel makes its way through its first issue. There’s a tremendous amount of story forming through Morris’s pages. The plot appears to be carefully constructed, but there is a LOT in play by the end of the issue.

The boar was twice as tall as she was. It had glowing eyes. She rushed away from it, green hair blowing in the breeze as it toppled a massive structure in its pursuit of her. Or maybe it was barely a piglet that had made its way into a pottery shop. People need stories. And maybe they need those stories to be larger-than-life. There’s a warrior named Matilde. There’s a scribe named Pitt. Maybe it’s something about the two of them helping each other out. Or maybe it’s something about the way a man needs to tell a story to explain that every story has its purpose. And maybe he’s telling that story to a woman concerned about his safety.

Morris swiftly moves from one scene to the next. Without warning. There are a few major things that he’s setting in motion in the first issue. Some of them are more interrelated than others, but they’re all very much bound by the need for survival. Morris solidly draws the reader into a connection and a contact with the characters as the conflicts begin to present themselves on multiple levels. The contemporary conversation between a Mr. Fisher and a woman with a clipboard...a Ms. Karan--THAT is the one that seems a bit more out of sync with the others than they are with each other. Morris’s addition of that one provides quite a contrast with the rest of what he’s presenting.

Morris offers a lot of detail in and around the edges of a very immersive world that he’s bringing to the page. The environments he’s settling the story in feel deliciously inhabited. All too often, art in the background of a drama is merely there to decorate. Morris gives his characters a firm and definite place to live that feels like it’s positively brimming with life...and so many stories around the edges of every other story. That he does this while keeping the lines quite clean lends the first chapter a rich visual dichotomy that could be intriguing as things progress into further issues of the series.

The story of stories is one of the more difficult things to maintain. Things can fall all too quickly into a nebulous territory as various plot elements begin to fall apart under their own weight. Morris has set up quite a job for himself, keeping everything in play without having plot elements crash into each other, but the first issue is clearly moving in the right direction to lead into interesting territory in the chapters to come.

Grade: A