Light Dark Fantasy: Sword of Sorcery #0 Review
Prior to picking up Sword of Sorcery #0, I knew nothing about Amethyst, Princess of Gemworld, because when it debuted in 1983, I was a 12-year-old human being with a limited, allowance-based income, and a penis. With comics 60 cents a piece and three bucks to spend on them, I wasn’t gonna drop coin on a books meant to empower the very people giving me boners just by being around and then laughing when I got one. Besides, despite being a geek since it was a word used to describe a filthy hobo who bites the heads off chickens in a freakshow, I have never been a swords and sorcery kind of fan. I grew up on comic books, The Six Million Dollar Man and Star Wars; I had no need or time for some blonde with a sword and magical powers. Not when I had access to Luke Skywalker. Wait, something there’s not quite right…
Anyway, what I’m getting at here is that, for me, Amethyst is a completely new character. And while I recognize that I, a 40-something guy, am not necessarily the target audience for Amethyst, I thought it was okay. It accomplished a lot in 20 pages, introducing the protagonist and doing a decent job humanizing the character and telling us her background, and explaining how what appears to be a reasonably typical teenaged girl might survive in a hostile environment like Gemworld… even including the gang bang scene. Maybe I should’ve been reading this book when I was twelve… but we’ll get to that in a minute.
Amy Winston is a typical high school girl with typical high school problems: trouble making friends, trouble relating with her mother, and trouble training daily with medieval weapons. She breaks up the monotony by interrupting and disrupting teen gang date rapes, and by following her mother through portals created by half-million dollar giant amethysts to a world where not only do iPhones not apparently work, but where a man with a working flashlight would rule decisively as a Master Magician if it weren’t for the actual master magicians running around.
Look, what we have here is an old-school, normal-teenager-is-actually-the-chosen-one story. It’s a standard Joseph Campbell monomyth story; a normal person called to adventure in a supernatural world, so we’ve got the Call to Adventure out of the way and the Road of Trials starting out, all in an economical 20 pages. And Amy is a likable enough character; sure, she’s ground down from moving all the time, but she comes to the aid of even mild acquaintances in need, and she’s not doing meth or banging bikers like Fox News tells me all the teenaged girls are doing. Amy’s mother also comes across as sympathetic, although the whole constant moving and non-stop sword training come across as a little paranoid – the antagonist, Lady Mordiel, is in Gemworld after all, and there’s no indication in this issue that she could easily track Amy and her mother Gracie… and I find it a bit difficult to believe that, during 13 years of public school, no teacher ever called Child Services after, say, Amy turned in a crayon drawing of “What I Did On My Summer Vacation” featuring her mother hitting her with a sword.
Page 1 of 3 | Next page
