The second volume of The Rook Archives is quite good as we continue to follow the temporal-challenging adventures of Restin Dane and his cohorts. But the gloss is beginning to come off the creation just a bit. There is a certain formula which is settling in to the story telling which cuts against the freshness which had marked the earliest issues. Also attempts at comedy fall a bit short of hitting the mark and that always leaves a bad taste in the mouth.
Among the highlights in this tome are a beautiful story drawn by the incomparable Alex Nino. Also quite strong is the final story entitled "Quarb and the Warball" which revives the uncanny sense of time travel and also is based to some extent on fan ideas. Luis Bermejo does an absolute fantastic job on Bill DuBay's script.
The crossover with the Vampirella magazine is a focus of this volume and it's a perfectly good story, but not the best in the volume by any measure, save for the ability to look at the lovely Vampi and her associate Pantha.
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I really enjoyed The Rook and his tales castling through time. I haven't read any in ages, not even when prepping back-up features from his magazine, but i pulled most all of them to a stack a while back to read through them all in sequence.
ReplyDeleteI'm glad to see that the stories are getting collected and archived. Too often my personal favorites are left forgotten.
Eeire in this period had some really fascinating takes on "heroes" and it would be nice to see more get a new audience.
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