Magic: The Gathering #1

This had a mainstream national release this week, but I did buy my copy from one of the Templecon vendors.

Title: Magic: The Gathering
Issue: 1
Date: December, 2011
Publisher: IDW Publishing
Writer: Matt Forbeck
Artist: Martin Coccolo
Colorist: J. Edwin Stevens
Letterer: Shawn Lee
Editor: Carol Guzman, John Barber
Cover: Aleksi Briclot

Okay, fine. I admit it. I bought this for the promo card. I would guess I'm probably not the only one.

Magic: The Gathering has been failing to translate well into comic form since around the release of Ice Age. This is the latest attempt, with the offer spiced up by the addition of an alternate art promo card (in this case, the card is Treasure Hunt, and the artwork on the card is the cover art for the comic).

The lead character here is Dack Fayden, a roguish planeswalker, who seems to be in some sort of trouble pretty much everywhere he goes. In this sense, Dack is a fairly generic loveable rogue, and much of the book is spent with him on the run from various enemies including Ravnica's cult of Rakdos, from whom Dack has just stolen an artifact.

Stealing artifacts is Dack's business, as it turns out, although he describes it as stealing spells. And Dack discovers that this particular artifact holds a link to his own past, and the first clue on a mission of vengeance that Dack had once followed until the trail went cold. Now, the new clue is leading him to (wait for it...) Innistrad.

The story was fast paced, and there were enough hints of depth to Dack that I was left with hope that he might be more than the cliche that is mostly evident here. I was pleased that writer Matt Forbeck generally kept game mechanics out of the story, as there are few things dumber than a game-based comic getting bogged down in game-mechanics references.

The artwork is good mechanically, but the choice to keep everything dark and on multiple pages to use a red wash over everything does more to obscure the art than to enhance the mood.

Overall, this was a reasonable start, and it is possible that a good story can be built out of this.

And the promo card is nice.

Rating: 5.5/10