1 out of 5

This is, I’m sorry to say, practically unreadable. I’m sorry because it’s not without passion and effort: writer Andrea Molinari and co-creator / co-writer Roberto Molinari clearly did quite a bit of research for the book, and there’s a well-intentioned attempt to expand The Shepherd in a more unique fashion than the “let’s be spirit-walking soul savers” episodic structure the premise lends itself to… but the fractured (and unsatisfying) story-telling effected in volume 2 moreso just exposes that the Molinaris are new to this craft. Each of the artists – we’re dealing with different ‘timelines,’ each of which has its own visual style – are each talented in their own ways, but only one of the sections functions as a comic book; the others either are more suited to illustrated text, or do not help differentiate characters enough to follow the action. The unreadableness is thus not a lack of skill or ability, rather the almost complete misapplication to a words + sequential art format.

The Shepherd sets up grieving father Lawrence Miller as a ghostly righter-of-wrongs: in our first series, unable to accept the accidental death of his son, Miller kills himself, set on the belief that his son’s soul is unsettled and needs saving. Instead, he hops on some spiritual hoodoo and gets ahold of a powerful truth-dispelling tool / weapon – his staff – and travels about limbo, balancing revenge with justice. The first arc is focused on getting Lawrence to that end state, but now that he’s there – we can get to revenge / justice bottle episodes, right?

Kind of.

Volume 2 spends a couple pages setting the stage, and then, while still in limbo – or “The Seam” – Lawrence, his son and his father are alterna-dimension whisked off to three settings, all tainted by war: one more focused around American military; one around the Napoleonic era and a French POV; one looking at Native American tribes, and tribal disputes. Within each of these, Lawrence is to zoom in on a particular person’s struggles, using his Shepherdness to guide them to a resolution and move on.

This is a solid concept, and using the varying artists is a good way to introduce de facto visual variation.

However, from, the start (the military setting), there’s an issue: from the writing side of things, Molinari cannot balance informing the reader vs. assuming we’re on board with his research; i.e. how much exposition do you need to give us our historical bearings? The text proceeds with a balance of way too much dialogue that tells us nothing; shop talk that I’m sure rings true but just adds clutter to the page. This proceeds throughout the entire collection, becoming especially problematic in the more history dense Napoleon bits, which includes a weird quirk I could never understand where the focus character talks. in short. period separated. bursts. Furthermore, there’s a sub-plot here about how Lawrence and his family get wrapped up in each setting – they’re automatically “in costume,” and assumed to belong by everyone there – but it’s never appropriately clarified how aware they are of their roles; that is – do they realize they don’t belong there? This sub-plot also gets dropped hotly, in favor of stacks and stacks of exposition that combine Andrea Molinari’s theology with the research with that naturalistic dialogue that doesn’t actually move the story forward… I literally cannot tell you: the names of the focus characters from each setting, or what the issue is they’re trying to resolve.

The “in costume” bit, and a lack of a definitive look for Lawrence, further complicates this, especially in the military part of the book (art by Kyle Huston), as everyone’s wearing soldier duds, and even trying to track unique details like beards or types of sunglasses becomes way too difficult as we keep jumping around between sets of characters talking without much story-driven reason; the art, sort of Mignola flavored-blocky, is good, we just needed more visual cues as to who was who, or writing cues that provided more unique voices.

In the French section (Cristóbal Torres Iglesias), the figurework is very stylized, to the point that characters tend to look different panel to panel. There’s also not great eye direction here – camera angles change, and actions do not track well (i.e. it’s hard to grasp exactly the effect of any given action on a page). It’s not that the art is poor, moreso poorly suited to this style of narration, which needed stronger guiding hands in general, to structure the Molinaris’ wobbly plotting, but also – as mentioned above – I see this feathery, loose look as better for an illustrated book.

Both the art and visual storytelling are much more “comic book” in the Native American parts (Joe Bocardo), which are, of course, the fewest pages in the overall trade, and are still held back by an unclear direction in the writing.

In summation, The Shepherd volume 2 was probably just too ambitious for the still-learning Molinaris. Volume 1 showed ability with the medium, and I appreciate the desire to go all-out with a Sophomore effort, but what I believe to be lack of experience writing comics ended up making the script very hard to follow – very hard to understand the page-by-page intention, beyond a high level – and thus perhaps also meant a lack of guidance for artists, leaving a lot of the visuals hard to understand as well. The effort is appreciated, but the reading experience was not pleasant.