Preparing for bigger stakes but living in the here and now.
Creative Staff:
Story: Sean Lewis
Art: Steve Uy
Letters: Simon Bowland
What They Say:
With their friends gravely hurt and their loved ones murdered, Kieron and Tamara return to Earth. And not just Earth, but their high school. After all, if the traitors and warlords of their home planet Priam want to fight, it’s gonna be be jungle warfare—and our heroes are going to bring them to the worst place for a fight imaginable.
Content: (please note that content portions of a review may contain spoilers):
The Betrothed series comes to a close (for now?) with this fifth issue and it’s something that I think largely works well but also highlights some of the pacing problems in the previous issues. Betrothed has a lot of fun ideas in it and Sean Lewis made an engaging book from the start that could sprawl in a really fun way for a long time. But it worked a kind of condensed approach here while still serving as just the prologue for the larger story. What helped with that was Steve Uy’s artwork as there’s a lot of fun in how dynamic it is and the way it captures the flow of things so that the pacing isn’t as strikingly noticed. The quieter scenes serve well to help with this even though they are fairly brief in the larger context.
The return to Earth provides for a home field advantage for Tamara and Kieron, something that even just being in familiar settings can help immensely with. The pair are pretty focused on securing things up overall and getting Andy some help with his wound is imperative. There’s some goofiness with a quick attack along the way and the football guys being problematic, but there’s a good bit of fun as everything gets put into place and we get some quieter moments. I like what we get with Andy but I also really liked that we end up with Tamara realizing that Kieron is right in that love is worth fighting for and that if everything is going to end soon she’s going to damn well consummate things as she’s not going to face death without getting a little. It’s cute and left me wanting more of how these two interact in this way as they’re both pretty adorable.
While this unfolds we get Salander and her group coming through the mist behind them and this again plays toward the bigger threat that’s coming, though it offers up some uncertainty as to Salander’s approach to her. She’s till intent on simply eliminating the betrothed though and everyone is still listening to her so it turns into a pretty decent little action sequence once she realizes the consummation has occurred. What becomes fun is in seeing how both Tamara and Kieron deal with her specifically as the supporting soldiers are wiped away. That this all wraps up as quickly as it does isn’t exactly a great thing as it loses some of the weight of the situation but also because it paints it as the start of a larger chapter that I’m not sure that we’ll actually get.
In Summary:
I do hope we get more as even with the flaws I really enjoyed the Betrothed. It crammed in a lot of stuff and barreled through things that should have been given more time to be explored and expanded upon. There’s a lot of familiarity with what’s going on in terms of concept and execution as it has a pretty good manga-like feeling to me but Lewis and Uy really made it fun and exciting in their own way even as it left me wanting it to go a bit slower and add more to it. This wraps up an opening arc as well as can be when it feels like it should be half a dozen issues away with more exposition in between but I like what we got here and want more.
Grade: B+
Age Rating: 15+
Released By: AfterShock Comics
Release Date: July 11th, 2018
MSRP: $3.99
