A group of oddly-attired people in masks are walking down a road. They’re attacked by zombies or something. Some archers on horseback shoot some animal and eat it. A bookish chap is crossing the sea and his ship is attacked by a decayed animal. A middle eastern-type kingdom’s ruler is dying and his throne is being fought over by two brothers. Sound vaguely interesting? It’s not. This is Sovereign.
The blurb compares this comic to George R. R. Martin’s Song of Ice and Fire series which is like comparing a dog turd to a steak dinner – after all, they’re both brown! Chris “iZombie” Roberson’s latest is arguably his worst and he doesn’t exactly write great comics to start with! A blur of Dungeons & Dragons and eastern mythology, the end result is an incomprehensible mess of badly plotted story-threads tangling themselves up in one another to no effect.
I could ascertain somewhat that the story had something to do with demons possessing the dead and bringing them back to life and I suppose our characters form a “ragtag group of survivors” a la Dawn of the Dead. But that’s such a corny concept and Roberson’s rendering of it is so flat and uninteresting I can’t imagine there are many readers who’re going to read this and want to see what happens next.
Paul Maybury’s art is shaky at best. Wavy lines create characters that wouldn’t look out of place in a Golden Age comic while the colours are cheesecake-y. I didn’t hate the art like a lot of other readers seem to have but I can’t say I enjoyed it much either.
Sovereign is an extremely poor comic that I wouldn’t even rec to fantasy fans as a sort of distantly potentially good read – there are far better fantasy comics out there like Rat Queens, Skullkickers and Red Sonja to check out instead of this drek.
Sovereign, Volume 1
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