3 out of 5

I often pre-order Humanoids books through Amazon, but after several months of the orders being canceled due to a lack of availability, I stopped banking on them and started removing them from cart if my total was getting too high.  …I have an appreciation of European comics thanks to the recent-er Metal Hurlant, which led me to the Humanoids imprint, which made me realize how much stuff Jodorowsky has written… and Titan Comics has lately been doing a good job of bringing foreign stuff, nicely repackaged, to our shores as well, which continues to make me look longingly at all those canceled Humanoids orders.

But I’m making some leaps there: that all European comics are like Jodorowsky, or like the stuff that was cherry picked for Hurlant (…which had Jodo in it as well…), and I forget that I’ve probably gotten rid of at least half of my non-Jodo Humanoids books.  Because while the imprint might produce some fantastic looking stuff, it’s not like that guarantees the writing will be stellar.  Indeed, though I kept Swords of Glass in my Amazon cart on a lark and was pleased to see it arrive, the story turned out to be a pretty frustratingly average fantasy tale, albeit a smoothly written one.

Coming off of the last fantasy book I read, Swords of Glass did do some key things much better: Corgiat designed a much more grounded world with elements of the fantastic, such that the different landscapes we visit – massive cities, barren swamp towns, deserts, mountain – feasibly seem to be on the same planet, and the mythology that’s a main feature of the plot is fessed up to as questionable by its sayers – meaning that, instead of trying to justify nonsense with more nonsense, the characters of SoG pretty much say that these things are what they are, and they don’t know where the tales came from.  This might seem like a dodge, but it feels realistic, in the same way we believe in our gods and nonsense without much rhyme or reason except that the stories are handed down.  This naturalism is mostly maintained in the dialogue and story flow, which makes Swords very easy to read.

…Although not too compelling for the amount of story it seems to cover.  We have two tales here – one of revenge: a young girl who swears it when fleeing her town from a local warlord type who appears to kill her mum and dad, and the myth one: as the young girl stumbles into the home of an older man and relates to him her story, which includes her placing hands on a Sword of Glass that fell from the sky and lodged itself in a rock…  There are four such swords, which can only be released by certain chosen ones, and when brought together they will save the world from a coming destruction.  So, proposes the older man, I’ll train you to use the sword for your revenge if you’ll help me find the other swords and do some world-savin’.  Cue training montage.  Or, I’m sorry, cue the next page, when the girl is a teen and they set off to further their dual narrative.  Such is Corgiat’s style, which takes a perfect adventure setup and deflates a potentially thrilling aspect of it.  Laura Zuccheri’s stunning artwork and lavish scenery and creature design carries us through, as does Corgiat’s breezy dialogue (or its translation by Quinn and Katia Donoghue), but for 200 pages there are many puzzling missed opportunities in the story construction.  And then just some red herrings that go nowhere, such as a flashback that hides a character’s face when there’s really no reason to – given who we meet as the story progresses, there’s only a couple of options that could’ve turned this into a “reveal,” but that sort of bouncy pacing prevents it from ever really building to that.

So all in all, SoG is, as per usual for Humanoids, a stunning presentation (although the SC binding is pretty stiff); the writing itself is of high quality, but the construction of the story doesn’t come close to fulfilling the potential of its setup.  Thankfully, the combination of good looks and flowing (if lacking) narration makes it an enjoyable enough read, but it doesn’t quite make a lasting impact.