The darker side reveals itself more as the War Party adjusts to Chicago.
Creative Staff:
Story: Tim Seeley
Art: Freddie E. Williams II
Colors: Jeremy Colwell
Letterer: Marshall Dillon
What They Say:
As the sword and sorcery slinging “War Party” tries to make themselves at home in modern Chicago, the mad monk Epoch Craev unleashes his beasts. Now, our heroes must venture into a dank dungeon filled with unknowable horrors: Lower Wacker Drive!
Content: (please note that content portions of a review may contain spoilers):
As noted in the opening issue, Bequest is a book from Tim Seeley that feels very different from a lot of his other works with the kind of cast of characters and even some of the language. It just feels a bit rougher in a way than most of his recent stuff that I’ve seen. It works well even if the characters are largely kept to archetypes for me rather than being fleshed out. Freddie E. Williams II is doing some fantastic stuff here once again as he uses magic and different worlds in a way where it still feels like it’s more grounded than you’d expect. A lot of that comes through in the character designs to stand out as it does and even the lettering for it from Marshall Dillon takes on a look that stands out like it wants to define itself. There’s a good sense of power and immense detail to so much of this that it almost overwhelms.
The opening for this issue keeps on on Tangea for a little bit as we get to see some of how thingsthere are being impacted by Earth. This comes in the form of a witchy woman who has in her care, i.e. cages, numerous powerful creatures. She’s not long for this world though as orcs given high-capacity weapons by Epoch Craev have come to kill her and bring the creatures back to earth for their own places. There’s a lot of fun stuff going on in this issue as we see the gang largely going through familiar quasi-montage material highlighting how they’re adjusting to the city. Some are finding enjoyable music while others are getting their drink and sexytimes on in a big way. It’s fun and a nice way to move past the initial material that you know is going to lead to nothing good for the gang. When everyone is together, however, it’s just a mess, especially since Warlock is pretty drunk at this point without anything to kill.
What they’re assigned is to figure out what’s going on because it turns out there is a giant beast of some sort in the Lower Lower Wacker Street area underground and it’s causing problems. This makes for a sprawling good action sequence to unfold over a good chunk of pages and Sharm gets to do some crazy fun stuff to try and take it down that really did work for me. While that plays out, we also see how Epoch Craev is managing the human/orc relations and how problematic it is because he’s come to really value the orcs at this point. It’s a nice change of pace from how these things usually go when it comes to whoever is controlling orcs. There’s a lot of action material in this issue and while Epoch’s is mostly setup for what’s to come with his big plan, there’s enough lingering around like this giant creature for the War Party to deal with.
In Summary:
The opening issue felt like it had two issues of material and this one does in a way as well. Part of it is that Seeley is going pretty verbose here, and sometimes when not needed, while Williams’ artwork is fantastic but so detail that it makes the whole thing feel busier and denser than it might actually be. You slow down to read more, which is great, and then slow down to savor the artwork, which is wonderful, but that’s problematic during the big action material here. It does have a high second-read and more value to it because there are so many details you miss the first time on both worlds that it’s really easy to recommend. It’s a very fun story with an interesting group of archetypes that are slowly trying to become characters. I love the mixing of fantasy and modern in general and Seeley has found a fun execution point for it.
Grade: B+
Age Rating: 15+
Released By: AfterShock Comics
Release Date: April 21st, 2021
MSRP: $3.99
