In the interests of Full Transparency, I will confess upfront that I love Arvid Nelson. And have loved him for many years. Ever since I first laid eyes on Rex Mundi, which is still one of my favorite comic book series of all time. (And I've read A LOT of comic books. At least 10,000...and possibly twice that.*) In Rex Mundi, Arvid created an alternate universe where...well, take it away, Wikipedia: "...where magic is real, feudalism persisted, and the Protestant Reformation was crushed by a still politically powerful Catholic Church."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rex_Mundi_(comics)
Yeah. (He had me at "magic is real," but the rest is quite nice, too. In fact, I loved the comic so much that after I'd bought all of the single issues (first from Image, then from Dark Horse), I bought the six collections (of the same books), and then bought the two omnibus collections (of the same books) Dark Horse published later on.
After that, I followed Arvid's writing through quite a few other books, including Zero Killer, JSA Classified, Kull, Thulsa Doom, Red Sonja, Warlord of Mars, Dejah Thoris, Lord of the Jungle, Lords of Mars, and, believe it or not, other stuff as well.
So when I saw that Arvid had a Kickstarter going on (with artist OReN) for a comic book called The Band of the Crow, of course I was in. And, as you can tell from the video above, it arrived today.
I couldn't believe the packaging. I was expecting a Manila envelope, maybe with a piece of cardboard for backing if I was lucky. Instead, I got the lovely box you see me dismantling above. Inside, a nice slab of that air bubble stuff and two bagged and boarded copies of the first issue of The Band of the Crow. 30 big pages.
I'd expected a rollicking good story from Arvid, and I got that in spades. The story is fairly straightforward: young magician in training (YMIT) is attacked by trolls, woman magician shows up to foil them. Next day there's to be a test for all of the YMsIT. Complications ensue. But there are so many resonances here. Arvid clearly knows a whole lot more about these characters than he's telling us here. It's almost as if he wrote a whole novel about them and is now distilling its essence into comic book form. Needless to say, I am seriously longing for the next issue of this book to come out.
What I hadn't expected was to be absolutely overwhelmed by the art. It is so meticulous, so beautiful, that after I'd finished reading the book I went back just to savor the pictures. I don't know if I've ever seen comic book art like this before. Check out this back cover, for instance:
Blow that picture up to full size to get a real taste of the magnificence.
Holy mazoli, man. It reminds me of some of the art I see in the better European comic books...but even better.
The Kickstarter campaign for this book has ended, so you can no longer get a copy there, but if you go to https://thebandofthecrow.com/ , you can sign up for a free newsletter which will alert you when it becomes available elsewhere.
* PROBably twice that. I have 9,000 of them in my basement, hundreds more e-comics in my ComiXology account, and have read many more from the public library. Yeah, probably more like 20,000. But hey, I've been reading them since 1966.)
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