After Colleen Doran's spectacular job illustrating Orbiter -- Warren Ellis's original graphic novel about the wonder of space travel -- earlier this year, I was delighted to hear the artist was going to be working on a new ongoing series from DC. I really didn't know what to expect from the writer, though. Giffen is doing an incredible job with J.M. DeMatteis on the super-hero spoof Formerly Known as the Justice League, but Giffen's work on Image's Dominion was completely impenetrable. The good news: Giffen's sense of humor is in play in this book, but unfortunately, so is that evasive sense of clarity.
An aged adviser tells a young nobleman a fable, a story of their twin worlds' history and how 12 dominions of power came together long ago to quell an uprising among the enslaved masses. He tells of how that solution to the problem proved to lead to a larger one... the destruction of an entire city. The nobleman, who's about to marry a woman he's never met, questions the accuracy and the point of the tale, which becomes clear when he's reminded why he's getting married in the first place.
Doran's vision of a world of magic and an extreme caste system is a beautiful sight. Her work here reminds me of Eric Shanower's art on the lovely Age of Bronze. Her figures boast an appealing softness, but she's able to bring harsher elements -- such as a violent riot -- to life as well. Wiacek seems to take a lighter approach with the inkns, as Doran's style shines through unobstructed.
Kindzierski's soft, pastel and bright colors really capture the magic and exotic nature of the twin worlds quite well. Unfortunately, the colors do fail the book in one key element: the shades of the narrative captions. The difference in color between the nobleman's "voice" and the adviser's is far too subtle, and I suspect they even get mixed up at times.
Giffen's certainly piqued my interest here, but his narrative approach doesn't really bring the story to life. I wanted to know more about the people depicted in the flashbacks, as they were the ones living in the magical setting that served to catch the eye.
The narration works on one level, in that the banter is funny. The characters' frustrations are entertaining, and they bring an intellectual conflict to the story. Unfortunately, the constant interruptions and tangents take away from the story depicted in the artwork, and it's not often than the narration and the story itself are in synch. The digressions are frustrating for the reader, and one even comes to dislike the two men telling the story.
