4 out of 5

It’s a little rough around the edges due to the hops and skips Dan sometimes makes with his dialogue and INJ Culbard not being the best fit for large scale sequences (which is why I don’t think I like his work on Brass Sun, because that’s all large scale sequences…), but in ‘Dark Ages,’ Abnett manages to accomplish something really admirable: penning an honestly fresh sci-fi tale and realizing that the best way, sometimes, to conclude a story is to realize that you don’t necessarily need to conclude everything by the last page.

The premise is nice and digestible: a pay-for-play army roves the lands of Europe, 1333.  Toughened men led by their Captain Hawkherst, kept in line by his second, ‘Lucifer’ Galvin.  Neither men have much use for God, expressing a similar wish to “not want to owe” the deity anything, and the group is starved for money and thus for war.  Night falls.  The stars seem to align oddly; something rockets to the planet.  And then the monsters come out.

Abnett summarized in a 2000 AD interview that ‘Dark Ages’ is about an alien landing in an old era, and how that might be interpreted.  This stands with fun mash-ups like Cowboys & Aliens or Ravenous and the like, and Dan does us the favor of not waxing on too much about aliens being crazy wacky and whatnot – to the men, they are demons.  It’s only a matter of how to fight them.  Something that they surprisingly discover in a monk temple in which they take refuge.

It’s a particularly grim story, making no bones about the fact that humanity doesn’t stand much chance against this threat, but we’re shacked up with a group totally willing to fight until the end.  Culbard’s art is perfect in its simplicity when dealing with intimate moments, but his reliance on coloring to fill in lost details doesn’t serve the creepies too well, and there are too many battle sequences that needed more scale to feel truly frightening or powerful.  As is, the beheadings and guttings seem more cartoonish than they should.  Abnett has a short-hand style to his dialogue a bit, allowing his characters to skirt right to the meaningful point.  It’s a commodity that doesn’t always work for me when combined with Big Publisher antics, but in a creator owned work, it sits right, and blends with the heightened realism effectively.  We get the grand gestures anyhow; having the characters boil their thoughts down to the core lets this mini epic zoom along to its wonderfully depressing conclusion without feeling like it’s over or under-stuffed.