Review: Eternal Warrior Awakening #1

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Review: Eternal Warrior Awakening #1
By Andy Frisk
May 16, 2017 - 22:09

Valiant Entertainment
Writer(s): Robert Venditti
Artist(s): Renato Guedes
Colourist(s): Ulises Arreola
Letterer(s): Dave Sharpe
Cover Artist(s): Clayton Crain, Robert Gill, Marc Laming, Jeffrey Veregge

Gilad Anni-Padda is living a life of relative peace in Ancient Mesopotamia as a farmer with a loving family, oblivious to his past as The Fist and Steel of The Earth. The Earth needs its champion though, and the age's Geomancer is tasked with returning Gilad to the fight...

My all time favorite Valiant Entertainment character is The Eternal Warrior, so I've obviously excited any time a great comic writer like Robert Venditti and equally great artist like Renato Guedes gets to tell stories about his adventures, especially when they involve his storied past. Gilad has lived through every age of man and the stories that can be told are actually quite endless. While the story in Eternal Warrior Awakening is rather mundane and not incredibly epic, it is a story that utilizes and relies upon the traits of Gilad's character and stories that make them great. He works closely with a Geomancer, something he's rarely done in his new Valiant 2.0 incarnation. He willingly accepts his destiny, even when it involves great personal loss, and most importantly, he behaves in a singularly heroic way. Perhaps these last few traits of the comic book hero are considered trite these days. Perhaps Gilad is just what the comic book superhero genre needs.

Sadly, the story here would have actually worked better as a smaller frame story, told in installments over the course of a new arc in an ongoing Eternal Warrior series that took place in contemporary times, but dealt with the same themes. Gilad's historical backstories work best in this capacity and really made Eternal Warrior comics unique. These frame stories also deepened and enriched the main stories by being set in realistic historical time periods that the artists and writers took serious pains to portray accurately. In short, they were often awesome little history lessons, something that can be beneficial to younger readers as a rudimentary knowledge of history, presented in pop cultural way, might actually trick them into learning something or sparking an interest in the rich history of the overall human story.

Okay, maybe that's a bridge too far in my argument for the need for regular and well written and drawn Eternal Warrior series like Wrath of The Eternal Warrior and Eternal Warrior Awakening, but somehow I don't think so. I anxiously await Gilad's next appearance.

Rating: 8/10