Magic: The Gathering #2

Title: Magic: The Gathering
Issue: 2
Date: January 2012
Publisher: IDW Publishing
Writer: Matt Forbeck
Artist: Martin Coccolo, Christian Duce
Colorist: J. Edwin Stevens, Baileigh Bolten, J.S. Holt
Letterer: Shawn Lee
Editor: Carol Guzman, John Barber
Cover: Karl Kopinski

Promo card for this issue is Faithless Looting. And yes, I'm still buying this series for the promo cards.

Planeswalker Dack Fayden planeswalks (as opposed to plainswalking, which also happens in MTG, but is something entirely different) into the middle of a fight between two Cathars and a pack of hungry vampires.

Wait, correction. Make that one cathar. The vampires made rather quick work of one of the two. The remaining one seems to have entered the fight thinking she was Buffy, but is now starting to feel more like another famous blonde: General Custer. Fortunately, Dack arrives and proceeds to set the tavern where this all takes place on fire. Who does he think he is? Jaya Ballard?

Mayhem follows, then a fast getaway, then a bunch of infodump. We're on Innistrad now. If you don't play MTG (but you do play D&D) , just think Ravenloft and you get the idea. Everyone else just think Transylvania. Vampires can fly here, a fact that Dack finds inconvenient. Fortunately, last issue's maguffin proves to be made of garlic or something because the lead vampire wants nothing to do with that.

Infodump continues pack at the home of Ingrid the Cathar, and the ending of the story essentially serves to introduce the villain.

This story isn't bad. Actually quite a bit of it was fun. But it was also incredibly generic. I'm hoping to see the story move in some more interesting directions now that the preliminaries have been dispensed with.

Rating: 6/10

Path of the Planeswalker Preview

Free Comic Book Day turned out to be great fun. I spent most of the day at the Free Comic Book Day Festival, run by Jetpack Comics in Rochester NH. The whole town of Rochester gets involved, and there is basically a comic convention at a hall in town, as well as events in the store (it was a Magic: The Gathering prerelease weekend as well), and a town-wide scavenger hunt involving many town businesses. I also visited two other conic shops that day: Double Midnight Comics in Manchester, and the Manchester location of Newbury Comics.

Free Comic Book Day comics that I'll be reviewing fall into four categories:

1) Comics I bought that day.
2) Comics I got for free that were not among this year's official FCBD offerings. These include some regular back issues, some freebies by indy creators (like the mini I reviewed yesterday), and some freebies from past promotions that stores were including in their offerings.
3) This year's official Free Comic Book Day promotional books.

It's from that last category that tonight's offering comes.

Title: Path of the Planeswalker Preview
Date: 2011
Publisher: Wizards of the Coast
Writer: Brady Dommermuth, Doug Beyer, Jenna Helland
Art: Alex Horley-Orlandelli, Steve Prescott, Christopher Moeller, Kev Walker, Izzy
Cover: D. Alexander Gregory
Design and Lettering: Jino Choi

The story here focuses on planeswalker Garruk Wildspeaker. We open with a brawl between Garruk and another of the original planeswalkers, Liliana Vess. Lilliana gets the better of Garruk after some back-and-forth action and Garruk vows to track her down because, well, I wasn't really sure. Actually I wasn't really sure why they were fighting to begin with other than that they both appeared to be so arrogant that it was impossible for them to be in a room together. Anyway, Garruk is apparently upset at having been whupped by a girl, and so he is searching the multiverse for Liliana so that he can find her and beat her up. Or maybe he wants to propose marriage. I'm really not sure.

What I do know is that all of this leads into a flashback scene in which Garruk is about to be drafted into the army at age 10. His father is apparently a war protester and decides that his son is going to give the local sheriff (of Nottingham?) the "hell no, we won't go" treatment. The son runs away into the wilderness where he befriends the beasties there. Years later he comes back into town accompanied by a baloth horde ready to take revenge on the Sheriff, who tries trickery without much success and ends up getting his just desserts.

The flashback sequence was considerably more interesting than the more current parts of the story. The artwork was good, but the use of so many artists contributed to it not having its own distinctive art style.

Rating: 6/10