The first issue of Captain Blood, from SLG Publishing (a company I was unaware of until now) caught me by surprise.While I knew the comic was an adaptation of Rafael Sabatini's famous 1922 novel, I hadn't realised that the comic was in sepia.
With Michael Shoyket's art delivered in this seemingly "unfinished", almost sketch, style - with strong echoes of the famous A-Ha video for Take On Me - it took a moment for my four-colour brain to adjust to the subtle appeal of this art style.
However, you only need to see the final panel of this issue, the reveal of Blood in his full pirate costume, to appreciate the depth of detail Shoyket can get in his illustrations.
Meanwhile, Matthew Shepherd's script, by necessity an abridgment of the original material, sweeps you up in the life story of Peter Blood, from small-town English doctor to slave and then pirate, populated with vile villains cut from the same cloth as many of the bad guys I am familiar with from Bernard Cornwell's Sharpe books.
Issue one stands as a fine introduction to the character of the debonair pirate captain and now I'm looking forward to following his further adventures.
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3 persons have something to say about this!:
Slave Labor do some really good stuff, although it's usually of a very different style to this.
They're new to me, but I was very impressed with this issue.
They usually specialise in goth-friendly black and white fare (a bit of a cliché description, but not entirely undeserved), so a straight up historical adventure of this sort is a bit out of character for them. Good to see though!
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