Image Comics brings you sci-fi and fantasy comic about a heroine in the slave mines who stumbles a mysterious power that makes the Earth turn upsidedown in First Knife, the graphic novel.
So, I just stumbled into a comic that is taking to another world, which is almost like Studio Ghilbi’s material. However the whole plot takes place in the far-future of North America, but unlike the other Image Comic, the Undiscovered Country, this story is more likely to be taken place in a desert, and it creates a world that makes Natives Americans looked so badass. The story is written by Simon Roy and Daniel Bensen and illustrated by Artyom Trakhanov. And as for that reason, I’ve never read a comic like this one that truly has some Ghilbi material like any other movie that I’ve watched.
The front cover shows a specific illustration that the author and artist are willing to create a world of paradise and slavery. However, this cover art is more to be like a movie poster, and I do like the art style though. What I can see there is that the artist shows so many details to the characters and the background whatsoever, but that I will explain that for later. But the thing about this cover is that it’s so great, it makes the readers know that this is truly a sci-fi and fantasy genre to put it in the bookstore’s featured comics. The first following page shows a map of North America which is the “Biomes”, meaning a large area characterized by vegetation, soil, climate, and wildlife. But according to the map, half of the Biome in North America was obliterated and left it into a wasteland, which is the desert. The story starts in the year 3241 A.D, which is a thousand two hundred years in the future where the whole area is surrounded by heat and people with some hygiene problems. However, there’s a runaway slave girl who is running away from some mean-looking men who are going after her, until she stumbled into some oversized mechanical robot who is activated by her, and calls himself the dark lord. So, the whole plot is that in this world there exists some of the different clans which are the Hudsoni and the Yanqui, and it makes them like nomads, but they’re very religious to god, even magical traditions, and the culture, which it almost seems that you’re in for a history lesson about the Aztecs. I heard the stories, but I’ve never known that the author has done so much research just to make this story about some prophecy about a slave girl who takes full responsibility to take the sacred knife and to protect this world. I wish I have something more to this book, but I haven’t fully witnessed the story because I’ve thrown the short version of it.
So the story is inspiring to me and the readers, to learn the rules of this world. However, this comic is taken to a fork in a wall to tell the story of some different clans which is one of them are ruthless and the other one is stubbornness. The blade is another thing because whoever forged it has to be an alchemist who manifested the knife to summon a mechanical robot who actually called it a demon. At the end of every chapter, the author gives the readers a summary of how their lives go that far from normal life to futuristic traditions. The insignia of both the blade and the robot says that it’s from “Nato” makes that both the blade and the robot belonged to a distant past. I don’t know what brought into this world, because everyone is treating him like a god. The art though, I’ve never expect to have something so dope, because the artist seems to have this kind of art style just like Yoshitaka Amano’s illustrations. To be honest, I have seen so many illustrations of him, but then when I stumble this book and looking back at “The Sky, the art of Final Fantasy”, it looks more similar to this artist’s art style because this is a sci-fi and fantasy graphic novel. The whole concept of the world that they’re willing to make as a setting of North America looked too real, to begin with, the landscape is beautiful, there are so many things that the world creates its natural habitats to have a rainforest, swamp, or the desert which makes that the world is still alive from pollution. It’s a big world out there, but this comic First Knife shows such a concept that this world is beautiful, to begin with.
Newsdesk