An elite group of knights are hired by villagers being terrorised by a wizard and his dragons. Unoriginal, generic, clichéd? Sounds like a Max Landis comic to me!
I’m willing to bet Landis wasn’t able to flog Green Valley as another shitty movie so it went to Image to be made into this comic instead. It reads like a movie storyboard with its broad strokes - think King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table/The Three Musketeers/The Seven Samurai with some uninspired time-travel chucked in – straight from Mark Millar’s school of hackneyed comics writing and reminded me of Millar’s abysmal Chrononauts book from a few years ago.
The story is unsurprising and largely obvious, leaning heavily upon genre stereotypes. The annoying Dudebro characters lurch from one dull, played-out set-piece to the next, making for an onerous, plodding read. It doesn’t help that the unimpressive story is vastly overlong at 9 issues.
Giuseppe Camuncoli’s art is the only good aspect of this comic. The pages are full of epic vision and dramatic scenes beautifully realised by this remarkably talented artist. He’s backed up by the expert skills of The Walking Dead’s inker Cliff Rathburn and I Hate Fairyland’s colourist Jean-Francois Beaulieu who make Green Valley look visually sumptuous.
Still, the art doesn’t make Green Valley worth reading and I can’t recommend this tedious, bland mashup of tired fantasy and sci-fi tropes.
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