Honor Bound

Writer - Jenna Helland

Story - Jenna Helland, Doug Beyer & Brady Dommermuth

Illustrators - Nils Hamm, Tomas Giorello & Steven Belledin

Letterer - Jino Choi

Art Director - Jeremy Jarvis

Based on characters by Brady Dommermuth and Volkan Braga

Released October 2008

SUMMARY

It can be found here.

Part one: Elspeth and her squire Aran head out to find the truth about "frightening tales" going around Bant. She has a few flashbacks to her youth and ascension, and eventually they discover a Grixis incursion into Bant.

Part two: Elspeth and Aran fight during a siege of Grixis monster. Aran urges her to use her magic, but she doesn't want to. Aran is cut down.

Part three: Elspeth blasts all the baddies and even brings Aran back to life, despite the laws of Bant forbidding it. In the end Aran tells her to keep using her powers, but she knows she will now never be at home in Bant again.

REVIEW

Yet another great comic! Once again there are three different artists who don't really gel with one another, but they are all fine. Personally I like the first part by Nils Hamm the best. It fits the atmosphere of creeping dread very well, and the flashback section especially is very effective. I also love the visual cues between the flashback and modern day parts of the story, like going from a Capennan torture machine to twisted tree.

This is a good introduction to Elspeth as well. By showing us more of the trauma she has been through it explains her need to leave Bant at the end of the story a bit better than Alara Unbroken did. Rereading it also really makes me want to see her return to Alara at some point after her March of the Machine rebirth! (Speaking of which, here's another bit of long term foreshadowing: "If others knew what I can do, they would call me an angel")

CONTINUITY & TIMELINE

We're going to have to do some massaging to make this story match Alara Unbroken.

• When stumbling upon the first creatures from Grixis Elspeth thinks "Ajani was right", putting it after their meeting in part two of Alara Unbroken. 
• After that must come Elspeth's involvement with the Bantian attack on Esper, as she's not yet lost hope at that point.
• Then must come the later two parts of this comic. The end of part three suggests that Elspeth is leaving Bant at that point, but that can't be the case, because...
• ...she has to take part in the final battle against Malfegor, in which she gets the Sword of Asha to Rafiq, and then uses her powers to fly him over to Malfegor. It reads a bit odd going from the end of Honor Bound to that scene, but at least she's already going "Bant was truly theirs, not hers" at that point in the novel.
• Then finally she leaves Alara in the AU epilogue.

Squire Aran complicates the picture further. We're just going to have to assume he's off on other duties during the first few scenes we see Elspeth in AU, and then recuperating during the last battle. And Elspeth just happens to never think of him when we see her in the novel. Nor does she mention that knight Mardis she's often hanging out with in AU in this comic. 

She must be pretty close to Aran though, as he knows she is a mage (though not the extend of her power), while during her introduction in AU she's keeping her magical powers from everyone, and is afraid that if people find out they would eventually figure out she's a planeswalker.

Oh, and finally Honor Bound wades into the uncertainty of Elspeth's age by giving her the narration "Years ago I saw the Angel's Cathedral. It was just after Aran's parents died ... Aran was still a boy - My new squire". This is vague, like almost all the temporal references in Alara block, but if she had a squire "years ago" (and must thus have already been knighted herself back then), that directly contradicts AU, where she says she's only been on Bant for two years (and hasn't left since, robbing us from that technicality to potentially explain away the inconsistency). If she's supposed to be in her mid to late twenties already I guess we can make this work with the Planeswalker's Guide, according to which she was squired at 17 and knighted at 20.  For now I'll just note this issue. We'll return to it when we finally get to Theros, which will fill in the backstory after her ascension a bit more.