By Mark Howard, El Chivo, Matthew McLaughlin, Dave Candlish, Dirk Van Dom, Stephen Prestwood
Published by Dave Candlish
I’ve looked through previous issues of Paragon (#4, #5, #6) and although I’ve found it interesting, it’s never really grabbed completely.
This time round, there’s an impressive new logo and good looking cover art by Matt Soffe making the book look great, but once you get to the insides, there’s a problem. Anyone who’s seen the recently published Jikan Chronicles Volume 1 will recognise the opening strip; 16 pages of ”Jikan: The Mistress Of Time” as a reprint from that book.
The Jikan strip itself isn’t bad at all though. Here’s what I said in the review of Jikan Chronicles along with the art:
“Subsequent jumps in time take our Samurai warrior to a far-flung future – where a scientific-military base is just preparing to activate a time machine…. Each time the demon is there, making life difficult for Jikan, possessing any he can, in an attempt to kill his Samurai pursuer.”
“…..El Chivo’s far flung future Jikan tale is very nice, flawed yes, but the potential is there and most importantly, the storytelling, through some crowded pages, remains very strong throughout.”
(Jikan’s trip to the far future, where time travel is being experimented with. Art by El Chivo, from The Chronicles Of Jikan Volume 1 Paragon Issue 7)
The annoyance of this repeat rather took away from enjoying reading the story again – which is a nicely done old fashioned sci-fi skit with a time-travelling samurai twist. No idea why there’s this repitition, mis-scheduling perhaps, or more likely a desire to promote the collected Jikan book. Whatever it is, this Jikan episode is one of the best of the Jikan book, and I’d encourage you to seek that out.
But for me, having already read Jikan, using half of this new issue to showcase recently published material felt like a wasted opportunity to showcase something new, or continue old series with various dangling plot threads. But once we get past Jikan, we’re into two completely new strips:
First of the new strips is “The Rise Of The Mekko-Sapiens” by Matthew McLaughlin and Dave Candlish.
As first parts go it’s alright, but there’s not that much there to either thrill, intrigue or really interest in it’s tale of a robotic race possibly descended from humans and the one errant Mekko-Sapien who fights off his programming to become something more.
Icarus Dangerous, written by Dirk van Dom and drawn by Stephen Prestwood is a fine ending to Paragon 6 and shows just how to establish a series in a limited page count introduction.
For a start, the concept’s intriguing, taking as it’s starting point the moment that Icarus realises his dad wasn’t just being too over protective and safety conscious when he warned his boy about getting too close to the sun as they escaped from King Minos.
From there we’re into strange territory; Icarus’ plunge into the oceans below and subsequent rescue by some mere-creature just brings forth more questions than it answers and brings Icarus far closer to the sun than the original story ever led us to believe.
The difference between Icarus and Mekko-Sapiens is that, with Icarus, I want to find out the answers. Maybe next issue? Hopefully?
Prestwood’s art is familiar to readers of Paragon already, as he’s the artist on Battle Ganesh. His art here is far better than I’ve seen before though, with a tighter control of both layouts and storytelling that makes the whole thing visually interesting to go along with my interest in seeing where the story is heading.
Paragon can be obtained from comic shops and the Paragon blog.
May 5th, 2011 at 7:23 am
Thanks for the comments Richard – much appreciated!
All the tales from The Jikan Chronicles will be repeated in the pages of PARAGON over time – I made a deliberate decision to bring out the collection first before all the stories had seen the light in the regular comic, just to things differently from the big boys who would do it the other way round.
Cheers!