3 crampons out of 5

So I guess it should totally be noted that I gave up on this series about 20 collections in.  And “gave up” is accurate.  I’ll decide to stop reading a book if I feel like it’s not going anywhere, or, duh, if I don’t like it.  But with Secret History – I gave up.

Ancient times, a primitive society destroys itself through actions unknown.  A man’s dying action is to give four of his offspring magic, powerful runes – The Lance, The Sword, The Chalice and The Shield (going from memory here, so that might be wrong) – with some cryptic instructions (either written cryptically or translated cryptically) about how the runes should never be brought together again if we want mankind to survive.

Boom!  This happens over about one page!  And then it’s ancient Egypt times and we see that these  different crux points in history – maybe ones that we thought were, like, historical and shit – were actually just power-plays by our rune holders, now called archons!  Aww damn!

Cue Archaia’s prestige-bound presentation of 20+ books each highlighting globe-hopping points from our history where the archons have manipulated events (through the power of their runes, which also grant them, perhaps, eternal life) from behind the lines.  Now, I’m not a history guy, so although I’m pretty sure sorcery doesn’t exist, I have no idea how much of history Pécau is tweaking with his stories, but the tales are awesomely annotated, so you get the gist – either we had no idea why someone did something, or we blamed it on someone when it was actually an archon.  It’s a pretty neat way to just cover history, but the storyline is so sprawling over the course of literal centuries that it’s hard to pick up anything.  Still, this is all admirably strung together by Pécau and drawn with remarkable consistency by Igor Kordey… although, again, that sprawling story also means that, beyond our main leads, we’re dealing with a massive amount of characters, and the realistic style with which everything is depicted means that we don’t all have distinctive facial hair or clothes, and people age, and so sometimes it’s very hard to tell who’s who until they’re addressed by name.

But why did I give up?

Sure, in part it was the history aspect, but that was sort of cool, feeling like I was getting this massive summary of events filtered through a view from the sidelines via the archons.  But mainly, it was just having no idea what the point of all this was.  Pécau goes out of his way to introduce OTHER archons, and OTHER runes, making it seem like there’s a larger story that he’s building, but then at the same time seemingly major characters will just fade in and out and suddenly you feel like you’re starting over again.  The archons motivations are also questionable, stemming from that one page origin, and they too tend to disappear from the story.  The extent of their power fluctuates, and they tend to lose their runes like people lose socks… so are we trying to tell history, or are we trying to tell a comic book story?  The theme of how fallible and repetitive humans are is constant, but this is proven after book 2, and is never explored too much beyond just, uh, stating it on the back cover.

So after 20 issues of uncertainty of what I was reading, I gave up.  It kept seeming like the story was going to conclude in modern times (initially the book jumped through centuries of history, but then it was decades, and then just a few years), until there were more and more issues announced.  Perhaps if the series ever ends I can return to it and figure out what the point of it all was, but until then, I’m done.  The presentation and obvious effort involved is definitely worth a look.  Kudos to you if it twists yer brain with more attentiveness and understanding than it did mine.