2 out of 5

Kids: trust your guts.

Swifty Lang is a cool name.  Archaia puts out a lot of cool books.  The covers on Plunder – rather grotesque, over-lined affairs with deep, moody colors – look appealing, so, yes, I picked up issue 1 and flipped through.  I’ll admit to some hesitance, mind you, as Lang was the scribe on another cool-looking Archaia book, Killing Ground, which I gave a couple issues and then dropped due to lack of interest, but I didn’t have such strong negative memories that I wasn’t willing to give another book a shot.  So I flipped through.  The interior art, though by the same team (also with cool names) as the cover of Skuds McKinley and colorist Jason Wordie, seemed to be much looser than the cover, but there was a fun sense of grindhouse gore going on.  Alas, the narrative felt a little too loose and scattered during my glance, and the book seemed like it might mine some similar cultural touch-points as Killing Ground which were part of what rubbed me the wrong way.  (It’s not not wanting to read about a culture, but feeling like the inclusion of the culture is meant to be more important, in some way, than the actual content… which is fine when the culture is the point, but KG was a werewolf book and this is a monster book, so… yeah.)  So I set it down.  Gut trusted.

…Some weeks later, I see the book getting some hype on horror sites, as well as general comic book sites.  And I see the cover of issue two, and there’s a big groovy monster on it, and I wonder if I should just jump in and give it a shot.

Flash forward and the moral is to trust your gut.

The plot can absolutely be summarized as The Thing at sea with modern day pirates.  Our point of view is mostly from a translator, a much more docile figure than his piratey brethren, not that we’re given much reason to like him.  The overall problem with Plunder is a lack of definition, all around.  There’s a huge group or pirates… or is there?  Maybe it’s a small group?  Characters fade in and out and are given one sentence sketches as the wily one or the violent one, but they’re all nasty attitudes and interchangeable.  McKinley gives each some defining scars or bandages, but mostly panels are so swooshily drawn and with similar colors that you’ll have no idea who you’re following, not to mention the way people seem to fade in and out of scenes so maybe you are watching a different person than before because, sure, he was always there.  And because this feels like somewhat amateurish construction (on both creator’s behalves), even the absurd gore becomes questionable: is the overkill purposeful or are you just not clear on anatomy?  So nothing much had me wanting to continue beyond book 2.  Except – and hence the two stars – there is a clear effort to purposefully do the horror thing, and it feels aware of its genre.  The book isn’t lazy, it’s just not really that great.  With some clearer framing and characterization (maybe thinning out the cast), it probably could’ve been fun.  Though my gut may make me stray from the next Lang project.  WE SHALL SEE, GUT.