I just had a terrifying thought: I’ve written so many reviews of Rob’s comics over the last decade or so that I’d bet any halfway decent AI program could fill in the blanks here pretty easily. Sure, the real artists should be OK, at least for now, but lunks like me who just talk about comics are in trouble. Ah well, best not to dwell on my once and future obsolescence. Let’s talk about comics! There are a couple of things you can always count on with Rob’s comics: he’s never going to cheat the reader (this one is 48 pages and it’s rare that he puts out less than that) and you never know quite what his comics are going to be about. This one, sure, that title gives you a solid hint right off the bat, but having a comic set in medieval times still leaves a lot of room for stories. This one starts off with a monk trying to see his abbot about a vision he (the monk) had overnight. Rather than dismissing him the abbot takes it seriously and calls in a few of his closest advisers to hear the monk out. His vision was about a field of the bones of 100 martyrs, which was big business at the time, and he’s given permission to set out with a few helpers to verify the truth of his vision. No big loss to the church if it was nonsense, so they didn’t tell anybody about it, but potentially a big reward if it was true. From there it’s a genuinely odd but engaging quest story, with the monks picking up companions along the way with mysterious (or not so mysterious) motivations, intrigue, hardships and even a murder. And once they do get to the location the monk had dreamed about, there’s still the question of the purpose of the vision and whether or not it was really a good idea to follow it through. This here is another in a long line of really solid work from Rob, and at this point it’s safe to say that I’d be able to entertain myself for a day without leaving the house if I just laid a stack of his comics in front of me first. And boy howdy, after all these years, it’d be quite a stack. So if you’re intrigued by old timey religion and artifacts, not to mention some genuinely bizarre visions, I’d say you should give this a shot. If that’s somehow not your thing, check out his back catalog. Believe you me, there’ll be something on there that gets your attention.
