Earth Wrath: Volume One

Posted: Tuesday, May 14, 2002
By: Darren Schroeder

Cover of Earth Wrath: Volume One Creator(s): Steve Saville
Publishers: Eel Man Publications (Self Published)
From: New Zealand
Price: $3.00 (NZ)

This volume collects the Earth Wrath stories published so far in various anthologies and single editions. They tell the story of a simple pumpkin farmer whose life in a post-apocalyptic society starts to get complicated when he travels into a village and meets up with an assortment of mystics, rogues, worm creatures and despotic rulers.

This is a complex storyline that moves at a hectic pace, no sooner does Wh-aire arrive in town and he is running for his life, and the town is attacked by giant worms. Some of the finer points of the plot are hard to keep track of, but the amount of detail and imagination that Steve puts into the artwork rewards careful examination. His style reminded me of medieval tapestries, with its naive approach to figure drawing and inventive approach to panel layout. Steve makes interesting use of text in his comics, using labels to help tell the story in an efficient manner and weaving dialogue into the panel layouts.

If the idea of jack and the bean stalk crossed with Dune, with a good dose of imagination thrown in appeals to you then this is worth tracking down.

In a Word: Rollicking.



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