Max Weaver' is going to find out a bit about himself. It’s not going to be easy. He’s  seeking a modified child. He’s not the only one, though. There are others. There’s a clash. Things are going to get ugly and worse...surreal in Precious Metal #2. Writer Darcy Van Poelgeest and artist Ian Bertram. The visuals are transcendent...bringing a magnificent dark reality to the page that is amplified underneath the weight of the author’s poetry. Author and artist usher the reader through a nightmare vision that feels starkly brutal and animalistic while also breathing through the pulse of something altogether more elegant.

She’s asking Max where he’s been. He’s telling her that he’s been all over the place. There’s a cult--The Disciples of Twelve. They’ve taken someone that should not have taken. He’s come to her because he thinks that she might know where they’ve taken the person in question. She agrees to help him out on one condition. Then she gives him one condition...and then another: once he’s gone, he’s never to return. Elsewhere there’s bloodshed. Opposing armies at battle. Meanwhile Max is looking into the center of the Earth and seeing something there. It’s turning in its grave. The embryo of apocalypse. 

Darcy Van Poelgeest has a lot more going on in the story, then comes to the page in words. The dark fantasy so often associates itself with heavy text and lots of very explicit world building. Darcy Van Poelgeest says a lot more in a few bits of narrative poetry than most fantasy authors, man, in thousands of words. She's diving into the heart of language in order to deliver something that is dream-like and terrifying. The narrative of the ancient warrior who has seen things “you people wouldn’t believe” feels like a tired, old cliché. But in her hands, Max feels like a wholly new kind of dark fantasy hero. 

Bertram’s work is brutally surreal. The overall design of the dark fantasy that is being conjured to the page is rich, and elegant in its delicious strangeness. The actual execution of the vision, however, however, has a delightfully accrued brutality about it that speaks to deeper emotions and a more narrative instinct on their own the visuals as conceived would not be nearly so effective without the relatively crude execution of the artwork. And the basic rendering of the artwork wouldn’t be nearly as captivating as it is with Bertram’s surrealistic narrative vision. 

Once again, Precious Metal transports the reader to a very distinctive different place. Dream like world that is speaking to something much deeper than can be communicated with words alone. This is the sort of thing that so brilliantly captures the way that comic books are unique as an artistic medium. What's being executed here couldn't be conjured in quite the same way in any other medium. It is very much its own thing and it is very much resting in its own world. And it's a very compelling place to visit.

Grade: A