The Order of the Forge #1 (Comics) Review

I’ve never been much of a comic book nerd. My typically geek things surround gaming, music, cartoons and the occasional anime. Until, that is, a couple of weeks ago, while my brother was in town, we went to go visit my local comic book store.

I’ve never bought a comic book before, but I’ve always loved the concept of Marvel Comics’ Deadpool, so I went and picked up the Death of Deadpool… now it’s a couple weeks later and I can’t seem to get enough comic books. Why am I telling you all this? Well, as a lucky reviewer at BG, my choices for reviews aren’t limited to games, so now I’m branching out and trying new things. Comic book reviews, to be exact. Let’s do it.

The Order of the Forge is an… interesting look at some famous historic figures, specifically George Washington and his friend Paul Revere. This story explains why George Washington cut down the cherry tree. Little does anyone know, amidst the cutting of the cherry tree, the ax flew out of his hand and landed itself into a magical totem pole giving him and the blade mysterious powers… oh yeah and he had daddy issues or something like that.

After receiving the powers of Nightwolf (sorry, that’s a Mortal Kombat joke… still stuck on games), he runs away and we fast forward through the next six months, where he is writing an apology letter to his father. Why has it taken him six months to write an apology? Well, because he’s not really sorry, and as we all know (?) George Washington could not tell a lie. The excitement doesn’t really pick up until the very end of the book, there was a weird bit with Ben Franklin that wasn’t really connected very well to the main narrative.

Graphically speaking, the character movement can be cumbersome and the framerate… oh wait, I’m dozing off into gaming territory again. Seriously though, the art style is pretty nice with a good amount of detail both on characters and the background. The blood in the fight at the end (which I won’t spoil for you) is stylized and it all comes together very nicely in my opinion.

 The music is…dang it.

Final Thoughts

I think The Order of the Forge could have been interesting, and I understand the job of the first issue of a comic book is to open more questions than it answers, but a little more elaboration on the sudden static shock George Washington gets from a piece of wood would have been nice.

The job of an opening issue is also to also capture someones attention, so I understand, and I have to say that it didn’t really capture mine. It was short and a little slow moving, but maybe a bit on in this limited series, the speed will pick up. At any rate, at the same price as a Happy Meal at McDonald’s, it’s not too bad and a decent start.

Though if the series doesn’t change, I could conceivably get more entertainment out of the Happy Meal.