Obscure Comic of the Month
takes a detailed look at a little known entry from my personal comic
book collection. Some will be from major publishers, others self
published projects, Original Graphic Novels, issues and Manga. What
they'll all have in common though, is that I've rarely, if ever, seen
anybody talk about them.
Dragondove Volume 1: Young
Liars by Les Valiant
Dragons wander the
wasteland, seeking the souls of sinners, or so they say. A girl
called Lucky doesn't believe that's the whole story, so she skips
town, looking to wrangle herself some adventure, mystery, and a
dragon of her own. What she finds is a world far richer than most
could fathom, and romance she never knew her young heart needed.
Contains mild spoilers
Should you read the
webcomic Dragondove? Yes. Its a fun little fantasy western with colourful art
that you could read through in a couple of sittings, and it won't
cost you a penny.
However, we're not here to
talk about Dragondove as a free webcomic. We're here to look at it's
merits as a body of work, specifically regarding it's first printed
collection. Dragondove is worth your time, sure, but is it worth your
money?
The story follow a talented,
if naïve, young woman called Lucky, who gets pulled into a cross
country quest with an unwilling tag along, the courier Primrose.
Lucky originally has the simple task of returning an ancient relic,
but her and Primrose both are quickly drawn into the conspiracies and
schemes of competing forces, culminating in Lucky finally taming a
dragon of her own.
As I mentioned, the story is
a fantasy western, which is a setting that still feels genuinely
untapped but is often tainted by being far too closely tied to the
steampunk genre. I love Westerns, but the lone, outlaw life gets
somewhat diminished the moment you start introducing airships and
clockwork robots.
Fortunately Dragondove
mostly eschews the trappings of steampunk. There are steam trains and
the like, but the world's technology is pretty much grounded, instead
it draws its fantastical elements from the dragons themselves, giving
more depth than most fantasy stories that feature the scaled
creatures normally do. Here Valiant draws inspiration from beasts of
the old frontier, such as bison, stallions and grizzly bears,
breathing new life into an otherwise overplayed mythological beast.
So anyway, the world
building works exceedingly well, and the use of Western tropes lets
the reader fill in the blanks themselves rather than being subjected
to info-dumps, and the drip feed of information about the wider world
helps fuel that lonesome feeling that's critical to an old west
setting.
But a great setting is only
as good as the characters you populate it with, and it's here where
Dragondove really shines. It would have been easy to populate the
story with stock characters, but Valiant decides to have a bit of fun
with them instead. Lucky herself is a great lead, eager and
enthusiastic in the face of a dangerous world, in that she's far too
curious for her own good. She's more Herge's Tintin than Annie
Oakley.
Primrose is a perfect foil
for Lucky. She's a mysterious, charismatic courier with a past that
hinted at being more important than it originally seems. It's Lucky's
curiosity that keeps breaking past Primrose's aloof demeanour and
shows her to be more human than she'd care to admit. The chemistry
between the two of them is perfect, and it's genuinely distressing
when it looks as though the two may part ways.
Likewise, the plot's focus
on LGBTQ characters is presented with a supreme confidence.
If there's criticisms to be
levelled at Dragondove then they are fairly minor. The art in some of
the early sections is a little scrappy and it's more obvious on the
printed page than it is on screen. Likewise, the first volume wraps
itself up a little too quickly, making it feel less of a coherent
whole.
But the art has a charm all
of it's own, and Valiant's style itself truly feels one of a kind.
The visual design of the costumes and the landscapes can only be
described as sumptuous, and the action flows from page to page so
easily that you'll be surprised you got through the book so quickly.
If all this sounds as though
I'm going easy on Dragondove, you can trust me, I'm not. Most
webcomics can take a while to get going. Many start with incomplete
characters, or unsure of their own world. Les Valiant has built the
foundations for the world that she's writing. Primrose and Lucky are
complete characters from the get go. It's certainly one of the
strongest openings I've seen from a first time strip.
So Dragondove is worth
reading online, sure, but it's also damn well worth reading in print.
Myself, I can't wait to re-read the next act in book form. It's a
comic that puts a new spin on combining old genres, in both it's
setting and it's characters, and Valiant's art is perfectly suited to
the dusty plains populated with an oasis of colour.
Read it for free, pay for
the print version, but either way I think you should give it a go.
Jack Harvey 2016. Dragondove
(c) 2015 Les Valiant. Images used under Fair Use.
