u/Locohenry

Since I read the first Corto Maltese graphic novel last year, I've really liked Hugo Pratt as a writer and artist, but man, this third volume of Corto Maltese stories (which I guess would be called "Always a Bit Further Away") really made me realize how good he was as a writer.

This volume is comprised of 5 short tales that take place around the northern region of South America and in the Caribbean. In these pages, it became more clear to me how important the search for freedon is to the author, be it through armed rebellion against oppressors or in the mobility that a boat affords an adventurous man. Corto Maltese remains a lovable rogue, although he is often a vehicle for stories focused on other characters, which are often tragic, strange, oniric and lyrical. This comic really succeeds at transporting the reader to the locales it portrays, which is aided by Pratt's straightforward storytelling that doesn't hold your hand, he just takes you into these romantic historical dramas and makes you learn about the characters and world through actions rather than through exposition.

Something that I realized as I was finishing this book was that the appearamce, disappearance and reappearance of some plotlines reminded me of seawaves, receding, rising and crashing, then receding again. This plot structure, besides being very appropiate for a swashbuckling maritime comic, enriches the world and makes the character seem more real, how some people will take on some task, but their mind will still be focused on the real object of their interest.

A real stand-out for me in this volume was "The Lagoon of Beautiful Dreams", an extremely well-crafted tale in which a character is characterized entirely by showing the opposites of his current situation. The whole book is full of great moments and I'd recommend it to anyone interested in comics that trabsport you into their worlds and that are deeper than they first appear.

Yesterday I finished The Savage Sword of Conan vol. 2, from a variety of creators an published by Titan Comics and Heroic Signatures. This volume collects issues #4-6 of the anthology series, and because it is an anthology series, I reckon the best way to review it is to talk about issue #4 first and then issues #5 and #6 (since it's a two-part story).

So, issue #4. This is a tie-in to the Battle of the Balck Stone, the Howardverse event from 2024, which is the last book I read before this one, so it's pretty fresh in my mind. This issue offers 6 stories starring the Heroes of Man, as they were called for this event. Now, I understand writing these types of tie-ins can be hard because they can't be required reading, but you also don't want the stories to be completely inconsequential. In this regard, I think it was a good idea to use this issue to show us how each of these characters exist in their own contexts and what their deal is, so that people like me, who are only familiar with Conan, can get better acquainted with the larger cast of this event.

-As for the stories themselves, I sadly have to say that I didn't like Conan's short story by Jim Zub and Fernando Dagnino all that much, since I've never been a big fan of stories that are only dream sequences, all the important stuff happens when we're awake, as they say; Dagnino's art was fantastic though, and I can't wait to get to the issues of Conan the Barbarian that he pencilled.

-The Solomon Kane yarn by Patch Zircher worked great though, managing to create a pretty compelling cast in only a few pages and greatly upping the stakes as the story goes along, and it has an appropiately bleak tone.

-After that we have Jim Zub once again with art by Dean Kotz to finally tell us what happened to Brissa at the end of Bound in Black Stone. I really liked this one, the fight was well coreographed, we learn more about Brissa's life and we also get closure on what happened to her in that previous story.

-The fourth story is a Conrad and Kirowan mystery by Jeff Shanks and Eryk Donovan. This story was fine I thought, it payed off on everything it set up, but it didn't really wow me. I was glad to see Mr. Shanks write a story though, and I hope he keeps at it.

-Then we come to a Dark Agnes story by Fred Kennedy and Andy Belanger. Belanger took a big swing with the art that a lot of die-hard fans of the magazine didn't like, but I thought it was great, it gave the story a unique identity and made it stand out from the rest, not to mention the lush backgrounds that adorned every scene. The plot, however, perplexed me; it read like the first chapter of a longer tale, but this won't get a sequel, at least as far as I know. Overall, the plot felt incomplete.

- The final story from this issue is an El Borak tale by Ron Marz and Mike Perkins. This was my favorite story in this issue, succint and to the point, but paced very tightly with some incredible layouts and use of gray tones from Perkins that made the action pop and heightened the already great script.

Now we've come to issues #5 and #6, which are certainly the main course of this collection, with an almost 100-page saga by Jason Aaron and Geof Isherwood. This was truly amazing, it felt like a story written a generation ago, but at the same time it deals with topics we can all understand today. Issue #5 deals mostly with the theme of scapegoating in society and how it affects the psyche of both the persecutors and their victims. Issue #6, on the other hand, deals with the more personal topic of personal beliefs (or resistance to certain beliefs). Isherwood's art elevates this story, giving us an aging King Conan traversing a frozen landscape, emphasis on frozen, since Isherwood's use of white space really helps sell the feeling of cold, and I was particularly impressed by the contrast he managed to create between outdoor and indoor areas and the sensations of frost and warmth that they transmitted.

Finally I wanted to mention the back-up stories from issues #5 and #6, a Young Conan tale by Michael Kogge and Dan Parsons, and a Dark Agnes feature by Michael Downes and Piotr Kowalski. I wanted to talk about them together because I think they were both okay, but I wish these back-ups tried to steal the show to be something that truly captivates the reader, like the 3-part Solomon Kane story from previous issues, which was so succesful that it allowed for a published Solomon Kane miniseries with another on the way.

All of these stories plus pin-ups, prose stories and some short vignettes make the reading experience of this magazine something truly especial, and makes me wish more publishers of popular characters took chances with creator driven books in longer and larger formats like Savage Sword.