Draxis Comic Review: Heirs of Isildur

Welcome back everyone! Here we are with this week’s second comic review. This one comes to us from Bearded Browncoat Comics and Games in Ocala Florida. Down at Bearded, they have recently expanded their CCG lineup as well as revamped the Games side of the store. As if this wasn’t enough, they have also announced they will soon be a purveyor of the Funko items of all sorts. So with this new stock of CCG and the new Funko stuff about to roll in this is the place to be for Card games and Figure Collecting! As always, click on either banner to be taken to the Bearded Browncoat facebook page!

OK so here we go again, another Local Artist has gotten their book into Bearded Browncoat and it’s up to me to review it so you know wether to buy it or not! Thankfully, this time the books not 20 years old; however, as it has come across my desk I’m going to be as tough on this one as I am on any normal review.

The first thing that sets this comic apart from others is something I have only ever seen for one or two other comics and done in only one or two issues. I think this is because it doesn’t usually work for a comic book as it goes against the normal comic convention. In this case, what they have is a chapter book filled with text and paragraphs with small picture blocks to accentuate the story, which is basically the exact opposite of most comics that tell the story through pictures with words to accent it.

Looks wise, the artwork is lovely. I would love to see these guys make a monster or two for my Cancel Cancer campaign as I am sure they would be awesome, however with the way this book is presented the rest of the looks have to be called into question as well. With the darker background, they have picked a middling font at best to use for their text. Between the darker brown background, the grey font, and back shadowing, it isn’t the easiest to read. Some font areas are bright white which would have been better but those areas then fade to the light grey which just confuses the eye and made me have to read some things over. Perhaps if I didn’t need glasses this might not be an issue, but I do and many other comic readers do as well. The other big problem with the looks is that they have certain sentences on each page that are in much larger fonts and a different color. This to me calls out as a chapter title, so I ignored them just to find I was then missing some of the story. My wife when shown this odd font layout and style said it looked like an Ad you might find stuck in the middle of a webpage you are trying to read, and her first inclination was to ignore those words as well.

Story wise this is a good little book. I think it’s a bit heavy in the adjectives at times and a bit heavy handed with larger words, but all in all it was a good first chapter to what looks to be an interesting steampunk time travel adventure. Sometimes the larger words seem to even trip up the writer as some areas ended up redundant but thankfully that only happened one or two times and with a bit better editing before hand could easily be avoided in later issues.

All said, I did enjoy this comic for what it was. I would certainly suggest it for people to try and I am certainly interested in what the second installment might bring. If you get this local comic for yourself, please share your thoughts and opinions on it with the rest of us!