In The Land of the Dragon

Written by Luca Frigerio
Art by Lorenzo Re
Colors by Stefano Ronconi
Letters by Tobin Racicot

IMPORTANT NOTE! Make sure to check out PART TWO which is being crowd funded on Kickstarter and ENDS MIDNIGHT TONIGHT!!!

No Dragons... yet.

The Land of the Dragon is full of fighting scenes, with a lot of shooting. It's drawn in a very loose, sketch pad style which I liked. I could tell Luca Firgerio and his team tried their best at putting action on every page.

The story is pretty basic. The hero, Kenzo has to carry a swaddled baby through hostile territory lest group naming itself 'The Sons of the Kingdom of Heaven' use it for evil purposes. Throughout ITLOTD Kenzo has this bundle presumably the baby in his arms while he wields his sword and fires off his gun. That's one quiet baby!

There's a scene pulled off really well where Kenzo's cornered. His co-hort, an Akira-styled motorcyclist named Jen gets him out of a jam earlier then mysteriously vanishes after a bomb goes off. Not to worry, she didn't die.

Kinda thin, but wait for more.

ITLOTD was a quick and entertaining read. I think it needed more pages to make it a story. Sometimes though you run out of pages of a limited sized print run, so here this makes a bit of sense anyway.

Also lacking was elements that would call out the Cyberpunk genre. So far all that was utilized was a series of gun battles between rival factions. No downloading the entry code, or hacking the mainframe, or talking to holograms. Sometimes I feel that in order to identify with a genre you are almost obligated to throw in some of the genre's expected touchstones (some might call them clichés). If ITLOTD lacks anything it's a Cyberpunk-ness in its story.

I'm sure there'll be more story in the next installment. No doubt more Cyber-punkiness of course. By the way, if you didn't read the top line this very comic is now LIVE on Kickstarter, but the campaign ends tonight for Parts 1 - 2. Be sure to check it out:

Next Tuesday:

Hard-core crime story involving a serial killer's past victims:

Decades
by David Taylor