Pathfinder: Wake the Dead #1 // Review
Nex is a nation of mages. It’s been embroiled in a war with the neighboring nation of Geb: a land of the undead. Somewhere in the middle of the border between nations at war, a group of warriors unexpectedly meet in Pathfinder: Wake the Dead #1. Writer Fred Van Lente and artist Eman Casallos begin the latest installment of the comic book based on the popular TTRPG. Jorge Sutil’s color frames the art beautifully. It’s a casually brutal sword and sorcery fantasy story. The clean execution of action is fun, but it lacks much in the way of thematic depth. The smooth, glossy action is not without its charm, though.
There’s a knight and a halfling bard who have come to a place between borders known simply as “The Awful.” It’s a place that reeks of viscera, living flesh, and digestion. It’s far from an ideal place to be, but it’s about to get worse. They are accosted by a gentleman who seems to know way more about the two of them than he should. He is, after all, a stranger. As it turns out, he’s an investigator who has been sent into the disgusting district for the same reasons they were. The three men are soon joined by a hearty, formidable dwarf who survived last year’s Pathfinder: Fumbus. The newly-formed party is going to have to learn to get along pretty quickly as the undead are advancing to attack.
It’s kind of an awkward lurch forward into action on the part of Van Lente. The sudden leap into an action sequence is not without its charm. There’s a respectable sense of adventure about simply slamming everybody together really quickly and letting the action sort them out. Had the dialogue been a little less stiff or the basic premise been framed in a bit more of a novel way, Van Lente’s execution might have had more appeal. Nevertheless, the leap into action in the first issue is fun.
Casallos’s style executes the action with a very clean and pragmatic sense of composition. The dramatic end of the visuals might lack some intensity, but the visuals feel sharp and stylish thanks to Sutil’s deft rendering with the color. Casallos’s art forms a really impressively wide frame for a colorist. Sutil’s color provides a rich and stylish texture and radiance in a battle featuring magic and the undead. Slashes, an impaling, and even a decapitation look bright and heroic thanks to the work of the art team.
Van Lente, Casallos, and Sutil have opened a promising series. All too often, sword-and-sorcery fantasy in any format seems to be trying to reach for WAY more depth than it is capable of exploring in a quickly-paced serial. The genre takes so well to action that any attempt at serious drama ends up feeling like a malformed mutation of subhuman Shakespeare. Van Lente and company do solidly entertaining work with modest ambitions. A series like this could go far.
