Whenever a new dark fantasy series drops, I brace myself for the inevitably breathless buzzwords promising it’ll be a chimera of what I already love. After enough flavor text swearing something is the second coming of genre triumvirates like Dracula, Berserk, and Claymore, you start to become cynical about the story underneath turning out anonymous at best and derivative at worst. Still, I took a chance onImage Comics’ new hotness, Regicide, because I couldn’t resist wanting to know more about the scarily sexy centipede lady on its cover. After thumbing through its first two issues, the series proved it wasn’t just posturing. It walks the walk and talks the talk as a dark fantasy so persuasively that I christened it as the first series on my pull list at my local comic book shop.
Created by writer Patrick Kindlon (Frontiersman) and artist Ludovic Lalliat, Regicide conveys a straightforward dark tale in the coolest way possible. Its story opens with an MF DOOM-looking masked drifter called Doru riding into a quaint village to ask its elders if he can borrow the services of a hulking old farmhand named Mihas. Off rip, the pair are the oddest couple pairing I’ve seen in comics. They’re the definition of diametrically opposed people, with a long road ahead before they see things eye-to-eye.
To Doru, Mihas’ life up until this point was comparable to a pig’s, whose narrow perspective of the world is to crane its neck up to bask in the skies hanging over the rim of his trough. He’s a hammer that shouldn’t ask why it’s being used, yet he tests his patience by questioning the nature of their arrangement as if it’s his first day alive. Chief among Mihas’ inquiries is Doru’s insistence that an old man is the perfect companion for assassinating the ruler of Transylvania. The old codger quickly learns he’s exactly the man Doru needs by his side against a litany of fantastical beasts and vexing oddities.
Suffice to say, I was quickly enamored with how wild and gnarly Lalliat’s textured art style is throughout the first two issues of Regicide. Each battle has a ferocious, matter-of-fact intensity, living up to the series’ logline comparison to Berserk. It’s a really gnarly read. Yet, every awesome page turn of Mihas smashing otherworldly entities into hamburger meat, Dorus spitting fire, nearly pales in comparison to Regicide‘s ethereal creature designs.
While they’ve yet to contend with a compendium of beasties, Regicide‘s already put in as good a showing as a dark fantasy series can in its first two issues. Like Mihas, I too stared slack-jawed at all the H.R. Giger-meets-Kentaro Miura demons the duo contended with. Beasties like Lulia, a giant centipede woman, were proof enough to get thirty creepy crawly feet in the door on aesthetics alone. But my favorite of the two major obstacles they faced was the ink-like shadow projection, which proved far more troublesome. Like a clandestine D&D enemy, this incorporeal oddity comes to life through the belief that it’s real. Along with that baddie proving wildly interesting on a conceptual level, the contemptuous banter between Mihas and Dorus is what really sold me on the series.
Like the monotony of fetch quests in an RPG on the road to more pressing matters, Dorus has no patience for Mihas’ bleeding heart wanting to save every straggler they meet on their journey. It’s beneath them, and Dorus never wastes an opportunity to be a catty bitch about playing hero or bestiary guide on their journey. They’ve got a funny buddy-cop vibe that really sells the contrast between Mihas’ fish-out-of-water bewilderment and Dorus’ dry, unenthusiastic take on everything mind-breakingly dire about the strange world they inhabit. Kindlon’s sharp prose and Lalliat’s otherworldly artistry are a match made in heaven, bringing the horror and dark humor of Mihas and Dorus’ journey to life.
Whether my two new friends have a snowball’s chance in hell of assassinating the Transylvanian big bad, I look forward to seeing them every step of the way.
Regicide is available wherever comic books are sold.
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