Black Ritual: The Book of Nyx #1 // Review
The puritan has followed a girl into the alley. She’s running from him. It’s a bit of dead-end for her, though. She turns and looks at the one who has followed her: The Puritan is a bald man in a long coat wearing red goggles in the night. She’s turned to raise a dagger to him. It’s got a red symbol on the base of the blade that seems to glow in the darkness. She moves to attack. She’s going to have difficulty in Black Ritual: The Book of Nyx #1. Writer Thomas Healy opens aa seven-issue mini-series with artist Nat Jones featuring a storyline pulled out of the margins of the Spawn universe.
The Puritan raises a hand in response to the raised dagger from the witch. The girl slams against the wall. It’s some kind of telekinesis that he’s using, but it’s really more of a force that’s moving through him. “I stand before you with the authority of God himself,” says The Puritan. The girl’s not out of options yet. She can still raise a dagger at the emissary of an unforgiving God. It might not do a whole lotm though. This is the beginning of the series and the girl isn’t the title character.
Healy does a respectable job of establishing the arch-villain and the hero in the early going of the seven-issue series. There’s quite a lot going on with respect to the deeper connections between the Spawn Universe and the rest of what’s going on in the series. The first few pages are a bit too soaked in the lore of the universe to make much sense to a casual reader, but there’s more than enough overall narrative momentum to keep things going as the scenes progress beyond the backstory into the contemporary world of the current series.
There’s a delicious graininess to Jones’ art that suits the overall mood and tone of Healy’s script quite well. It feels like it’s moving in a very solid and solidly respectable direction straight through from beginning to end. The moody dakrness is accompanied by occasionally flashes of dark power that feels suitably radiant around the edges of an action that feels more or less perfectly lined-up with everything that needs to happen in the first issue and the overall feel of a series that lurks in the shadows of mainstream horror fiction.
The Spawn Universe has been one massive attempt to fuse traditional supernatural horror with a dark edge 1990s superhero genre. It’s been a fun universe that’s been echoing into itself for decades now. It can feeling disgustingly repetitious as the years pass, but every now and then there’s something that sneaks through that feels delightfully ew in one way or another. Nyx’s story mught just move itself in the right direction to make for some new element that might be added out of the margins of the Spawn Universe to develop into something remarkably new and fresh.
