Broken Trident

Story by Dave Steinborn and Travis Bowen
Art by Ailer Azusano and Coiver Yelo
Lettering by Christopher Beck and Dave Steinborn

Cartoon style.

Some of the neater technological advances we've seen in rendering artwork in the last 20 years or so is the introduction to the tablet, of being able to directly paint on your screen. Many a video game, novel, or RPG has had its covers adorned with breath-taking vistas of incredible imagination. Broken Trident visually is a hybrid between black line comic book traditional style visuals with what looks to be mostly painted tablet backgrounds. The effect of this makes Broken Trident look like a children's animated cartoon. Indeed, this comic is very colorful and contains much lively detail.

The story begins with an aquatic creature named J'nor narrating his time on a pirate ship as he's taken back to his undersea homeland city Sanserine. He finds it much to his dismay destroyed by The Band of Seven. J'nor enlists his friend Xedren along with the crew of the pirate ship to exact revenge on them.

Broken Trident has some interesting concepts. Bad writing and clunky art kept me from enjoying it all that much, I'm afraid.

Bad writing.

The blurb on the back cover describes BT as "a combination of underwater adventures and exciting pirate battles." What we got was exactly two murky panels on page one of cannon fire and a double page splash of a sea monster on the last page. So much for pirate battles. The other 9 or so pages taking place on the pirate vessel had the crew laying around, sleeping, or playing cards. As for underwater adventures there's about 12 or so pages of J'nor and Xedren doing a lot of talking about the tragedy of the ruined city, talking about being able to communicate telepathically, and then at last J'nor finding an enemy's blade left behind.

Vast chunks of this comic could have been thrown overboard in favor of ramping up the action and putting your good guys right up against their foes without making the reader wait.

"zzzz...."

Characters have strange dopey smiles on their faces half the time.

The Pirate Captain Lysande' points her sword several times but has no foe she's attacking, she just wants to point the sword to empty air. Why?

I have to talk some more about the tablet art backgrounds. They're terrible. They only serve to knock this comic down to this bland 'blah' feeling all around.

The graphics don't work too well either. The logo's hard to read, using a Photoshop 3-d effect that looks straight out of 2003. And then there's a resurgence of the horrible 'colored gradient' narration boxes I've seen before in The Black Hand. Word to the wise: just because you have a tool to use doesn't mean you need to use it.

Steinborn and company, the team at Lakeshore Comics might have more to offer me in the future, but it would take a lot of improvement in their writing and art to bring me back in. Let this one stay broken.

Next Tuesday:

Staying in the fantasy realm a little longer with an 'Assassin's Creed' looking Gage and the Dragon's Tear 1 - 3 by Patrick Kellner!