Nemesis promo comic

Story - Scott McGough & Kev Walker (based on the novel by Paul B. Thompson)
Art - Kev Walker
Editor - Michael Mikaelian
First appearend in Top Deck #4

Another quick post, covering the next promotional comic. I've included the pictures below, but following this link to a thread on MTGSally, where it was first shared by KavuMonarch, is probably more convenient.

If you are really in dire need of a review: Again, the art is fantastic. Very dynamic, amazingly detailed. Not a single bad thing to say about it. There writing is fine, but again it is hard to really critique it when it is just a few scenes from a novel stitched together to wet your appetite. Other than that... I dunno. You can read my comments on the Mercadian Masques promo comic again. Everything I said there applies to this comic as well. The only difference is that this doesn't cover a specific scene, but combines a few small parts of various chapters. This is still an adaptation that varies from the novel version though, and as such shouldn't be considered canon. No matter how pretty it looks.

I hope this comic has made you interested in the novel. The review will be up next weekend!

Mercadian Masques

Writer - Francis Lebaron
Cover artist - Kev Walker
Released September 1999

SUMMARY
We start where Rath and Storm left off: the Weatherlight just went through the planar portal, only to crash on a farm on an unfamiliar plane. They immediately get mistaken for Ramos, a local deity who also famously crashed from the sky after traveling from another plane, and thus the crew is immediately in trouble. The ship, with Orim still on it, is taken by the Cho-Arrim forest dwellers, while most of the crew is arrested by the Mercadians and taken to their inverted mountain city.

Mercadian Masques promo comic

Story - Scott McGough & Kev Walker (based on the novel by Francis Lebaron)
Art - Kev Walker
Editor - Michael Mikaelian
First appeared in Duelist presents MAGIC: the Gathering Mercadian Masques

After the demise of The Duelist Wizards was supposed to go full digital, yet somehow ended up publishing magazines for a while longer. First there was "Duelist presents MAGIC: the Gathering Mercadian Masques" (which going by the text next to its barcode I would just call The Duelist #42, but neither the MTGSalvation Wiki, nor Magic Librarities, nor Wikipedia mention it), then 15 issues of Top Deck. All of these are entirely skippable for those reading through the storyline canon, but there is one feature that I wanted to talk about anyway: the promotional comics for the novel line.

For all sets of Masques block and Invasion Kev Walker took a scene from the novels and adapted those to comic form. There are a bunch of differences between the original scenes and the comics, and obviously the novels trump their adaptations, so I don't count these as canonical. However, they are pretty awesome, and fairly well known after they were shared on MTGSalvation a few years back (9 years still counts as a few. Shut up.)  So they are worth a quick look!


Reading them in the thread I linked to above is probably easier than clicking through the media displayer of Blogger, but here it is for completion's sake. This comic is from that thing that may or may not be The Duelist #42.

First off: the art is fantastic! There are one or two odd poses, but other than those everything is great. Amazingly detailed and very dynamic. Kev Walker was a very good choice for doing these comics, as while you may just know him as a long standing Magic artist, he also has an extensive career in comics. This is someone who knows how to do page lay-outs and panel transitions and portrays the illusion of movement expertly.