A pestilence may recede for a bit but it often doesn’t disappear.
Creative Staff:
Story: Frank Tieri
Art: Oleg Okunev
Colors: Rob Schwager
Letterer: Marshall Dillon
What They Say:
The year is 1353. The fugitive Roderick Helms has retreated to a life of hidden seclusion after failing to expose the Church’s role in the Black Death. But something threatens to bring him back into action. Something that has risen which will threaten to transform the waning plague into a far more darker and sinister crisis. And that something is none other than Satan himself!
Content: (please note that content portions of a review may contain spoilers):
The first Pestilence series was one that I had only read the first issue of but wanted to read the rest as I really liked the design of it. Frank Tieri and Oleg Okunev put together a fun and gritty work that played to the 1300’s period well. The artwork and color design for it gave it such a distinctive feeling while Tieri’s concept and the script for it captured the intensity and power well. So with a second series getting underway, I’m admittedly going on with a bit less knowledge than I should but having good experiences with some other works by Tieri I wasn’t all that concerned about it as he does handle the reconnect well.
Taking place initially in 1351 with someone planning to kill the pop in the Vatican, it shifts us back to a few weeks prior with how things have changed since the cure for the pestilence was revealed. Having Cardinal Shaw riding around and enjoying all the glory of helping to bring people back to normalcy, the chalice is lost as Pope Fiat Lux has sent our soldiers to bring it back to him. The importance of the chalice is well-handled here, if brief, as it reminds us of exactly how things can be rectified here. But it’s also something that can do only so much at a time and has left me wondering just how widespread the pestilence is at this point.
While that unfolds we learn of how many of those that have come back to life have formed something called The Risen, which is a group that deals with the struggle of what they went through and what they did, which can be pretty brutal. With what some or most of them did in attacking, killing, and eating others, the psychological aspects could be neat to really dig into. What’s put in play here, however, is seeing Sir Richard, a survivor of the event, being accosted by the very creator of the black plague itself and taking full control of his body as the plague was just the beginning of what he’s intent on bringing into the world. Though the book delves into some other survivors afterward and sets what’s to come, it’s this piece here that’s intriguing as Richard is essentially lost to this force of the devil himself and quickly reconverts many to how they were to spread into the world again.
In Summary:
The original Pestilence series was one that I was definitely interested in but didn’t get to follow through on. I got enough from that one to make sense of this but I also think Tieri made this plenty accessible to new readers. It’s a bit awkward in some of the back and forth of events throughout it but a second read helps to clarify a few things once you get some foundation to it. The idea of a more forceful event coming into play with what the creator of the black plague has in mind is chilling considering the scale of what happened before. With Okunov putting in more fantastic artwork that looks great here (my edition was a black and white preview, no color), it’s definitely following what came before and it looks to expand this world well. I’m eager to see where the creative team will take it all.
Grade: B
Age Rating: 17+
Released By: AfterShock Comics
Release Date: May 30th, 2018
MSRP: $3.99
