Myths & Legends Quarterly: Dagon // Review
Cthulhu has been sleeping for a long time. Aeons, in fact. It’s really only a matter of time before he wakes up. He hasn’t been alone with his dreams, though. His greatest general has been awake and waiting the whole time. He looks to gather the keys that will unleash the elder god in Myths & Legends Quarterly: Dagon. The writing team of Joe Brusha, Dave Franchini, and David Wohl develop a tale that is brought to the page by a series of artists, including Dario Tallarico, Alessandro Uezu, Massimiliano La Manno, and Ricardo Osnaya. Color comes to the page throughout the issue courtesy of Maxflan Araujo.
Honestly, he wasn’t expecting to have to collect the keys himself. He had a group of people. Followers. They were supposed to have the keys ready for him. Now, he’s got to go and get them himself. Somewhere in the midst of it all, there was this kid. His father left him. His mother was an alcoholic. He was just a boy lingering around domestic decay when a rat turned to him and simply said: “burn.” From there, it was a journey into Lovecraftian darkness that would find him meeting with Cthulhu’s greatest general and preparing for the elder god’s return.
The writing team mixes the madness of psychological horror with the magic of supernatural horror to varying degrees of success. To a certain extent, it feels as though the central plot of the one-shot could have been separated into a few different distinct issues...maybe even two or three mini-series. Not that it feels at all rushed. Every end of the story seems to be given the right amount of space between the covers of the issue. It just feels like kind of a disjointed collection of characters who all fit into the same plot.
The psychological horror has its moments visually. The blood spatter of a serial killer still has quite a bit of strength on the page. The greatest strength of Dagon lies in its rendering of supernatural monsters on the page. It’s pretty remarkable that a series of artists this lengthy would put together a book that seems this integrated. Some of the overall integration may come from the fact that there’s only a single colorist on the book. Araujo does a beautiful job of conjuring mood and visual tone to the page. It’s a very atmospheric book throughout. Muscle, sinew, and unearthly glowing eyes make nearly every monster on the page look transcendently dark.
The story continues. Dagon isn’t finished at the end of the issue, but he’s made important progress. The drama that makes its way from cover to cover mixes straight-ahead psychological horror with epic sword-and-sorcery fantasy horror and something slightly darker. So many things in Dagon are being fused together by a rather large team. It’s impressive in light of this that the issue feels as coherent as it does. So much of the issue looks so good. It’ll be interesting to see where Dagon goes from here.
