Shadow Knight, the #2

Posted: Tuesday, July 13, 2004
By: Darren Schroeder

Cover of Shadow Knight, the #2 Creator(s): Alverne Ball
Publishers: Quality Quill
From: USA
Price: $2(US)

Shadouryu has already shown that he more than adept in the martial arts. Richardson, head of the now all powerful I.M.F. has brought him to their HQ to invite him to work with them in combating the attacks of various rogue elements amongst the surveying population in the post-apocalyptic earth.

This book suffers from some terrible reproduction on the majority of pages - blurred artwork makes some of the dialogue almost unreadable and don't help the drawing. There's lots of blurred and smudges faces making expressions hard to read. The Martial arts action is energetically illustrated with lots of neat robots, shooting rockets and generally giving the hero a run for his vow of poverty. Cory does some cleaver variations of the page layouts in order to ad pace to the appropriate scenes.

Just about any 'come work for us' cliché makes an appearance in this book, so there isn't much in the way of original character development. The boss is a slick fast talker, and our hero doesn't say much at all. I'm suspecting a double cross sometime soon, cause if not this story is kind of pointless.

With a mix of Sci-Fi dystrophia and martial arts action the premise has a wide scope for entertaining and imaginative scenarios, but so far the book is stuck in routine set up mode. Now Shadouryu has some fancy stealth ninja gear hopefully a few things will start happening, and the artwork won't be sabotaged by poor printing.

In a Word: Numb.



If you have a comment or question about Small Press then feel free to contact me