Beasts of Burden #1 - Mobile Edition

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Beasts of Burden #1
By Zak Edwards
September 21, 2009 - 16:32

Dark Horse Comics
Writer(s): Evan Dorkin
Penciller(s): Jill Thompson
$2.99 US

Alright, so, I bought this on a whim. The file at my local store was low so I decided to try out a number one, hop onto something and see how it is. My comic book guy told me this was pretty good and I said “Yeah right, it’s about puppies.”
I hate it when I’m right.
This book isn’t just about puppies, it’s about puppy (and kitty!) witches and wizards fighting weird demon type things. And yes, it is as bad as the premise sounds.

Basically the whole book reads like the opening hour of a Disney video game, something we may have to get used to if Marvel’s new parent decides to stop outsourcing. But it really does. There is an opening cut-scene with some fairly uninspired dialogue introducing the characters one-by-one and then a journey into the woods and a battle against some sort of enemy which will play into the larger story. Follow this up with some dialogue about what just happened and roll opening credits. Sound familiar to all you RPG gamers out there? The fight with the demon even sounds like a tutorial in the game, with your objective being to grab the tongue of the demon long enough to have your ally cut it off. So maybe a more violent form of a Disney video game, but the evil demon mini-boss does explode into smaller frogs, so not that far. And that’s what this book is, a script for a bad video game, complete with in-comic tutorial and everything.

So where the story of this book falters at the absolute best, the art is very pretty in a landscape painting sort of way. She has a very good ability to have these animal characters emote in ways which doesn’t make them have their eyes popping out of their head. The painted scenes are very, well, pretty to look at and that’s basically the only strength of the book. If you like The Group of Seven, you’ll like this book, it’s a pity there’s all these speech bubbles in the way.

3/10 I’m still surprised there wasn’t a Heads-Up Display.