Alright, so I've been on a bit of a Luna Brothers kick lately if you couldn't tell. I enjoyed their other books quite a bit, so I figured why not start reading the recently finished "The Sword"? So I went into this without any preconceived notions. I had no idea what this was about, just that it could be hyper violent at times, and I've got to say that so far I've liked what I found. Basically this story is about a girl who is a paraplegic who's family gets attacked and murdered because this group of people thinks that her father is someone who he claims not to be. These three people who attack them apparently have some kind of magic/mutant powers. They leave her for dead, and she discovers this sword deep beneath her house, and it heals her entirely. Well upon discovering that she's alive, these people send a group of people to kidnap her and get their sword back, which they were after in the first place. From this point on things start going downhill for the main character, Dara. She discovers that this sword is some kind of ultimate weapon when she kills all the dudes sent after her, and then runs from the police with ease.
My biggest problem with this book so far is the fact that she tries to turn herself into the police to get their help, and it's awfully predictable to assume that they're not going to help at all, and will instead probably fuck her over at some point. I think it would have been much more fun to have her be assisted by the government, but instead that shit gets all messed up too. It seems like an easy cop out, no pun intended, to have this character be on the run. I have hope that there's some creative stuff done with it later, because if not it might aggravate me. There's also these long scenes at the beginning of every issue that are like two or three pages long where these villains talk to one another. To me these just seem like needless over extended recaps. Why tell the audience what your villains are doing every step of the story? So there are scenes where shit goes down that could go either way, but you know what's going on because you heard the villains' plan. It just seems a little awkward for the reader to be in on what's going on, and the characters be clueless. During the scene or two where you actually get to see the sword in action it does kick a lot of ass. It's very cool watching someone who's not really sure about what they're doing murder several people because of an instrument that's in her hand. It's like any slight movement she makes would end up in slicing right through people, or leaping over buildings. That was by far my favorite part, which is surprising because i'm not usually into that kind of over the top action, but here it's done very well and I can't wait to see more of it!
So in the last chapter of this volume Dara meets up with her friends who she previously abandoned to turn herself in. They're all on the run now with not too much more than this super powerful sword. This dude Justin had her dad's creative writing class a few years before and apparently he told his class of his travels in his previous life as this character Demetrios. He then relays some of these tales to Dara. Now this is basically where the book goes into backstory mode and, i hope, gets it all out of the way. There were four bad guys who each control an element and they used their powers to rule, but to keep each other in check they forged a sword using each of their powers. Demetrios was given this sword by the other three to kill the most powerful one. Afterwards he left the other three alive, but constantly reminding them that he could fuck their day up. My problem with this is that I can't tell whether this is borrowing strongly from The Last Airbender, or whether the writers just chose the not that original route for this story. I'm hoping they do something a little more creative with it in the later books, but they're even called Water, Earth, and Air...
I definitely have to say I'm not sold yet. I can't decide if this is just another version of a story I've seen dozens of times, or whether it's a great reimagining of those stories that's going to top them all. I'm going to keep reading until it gets bad, because the parts I liked I did like a lot. Maybe I just liked Girls better because you have no idea what the fuck is going on from start to finish, where as this seems to be almost holding your hand the whole way through. If you like what you see, and you'd like to check this book out for yourself you can Search Amazon.com for The Sword Vol. 1 Fire
, or you can just click the box below.Thanks for reading
James
No comments:
Post a Comment