The Duelist #1-2 & The Duelist Supplement 1994 (Arabian Nights & Antiquities)

Let me open with thanking the amazing Mike Linneman for providing me with scans of these issues, allowing me to finally complete my look at the pre-rev issues of The Duelist! I'd tell you all to go read his articles over on GatheringMagic.com, but considering the difference in hits between my blog and that site you probably already are.

The main point of interest here is the original telling of the Antiquities story from the supplement, though I'll also quickly go through some interesting sounding stuff from the first two proper issues. Or just the first one really, there isn't any lore stuff in number two.

For the sake of clarity: the supplement is sometimes called #0 or #1.5 online. Apparently there were also versions in 1995 and 1996. I haven't been able to find out much about those, but I'm assuming they don't have lore relevance. The 1995 has a cool cover though.

Rath block wrap-up & continuity overview.

Up to now I've looked at all the parts of Rath block individually. Now it is time to take a step back and look at the big picture. Al the various media outlets were meant to go hand in hand, each focusing on a different aspect of the story but creating a bigger picture when all taken together. So how did that work out? Does the story hold up? Do we like this format, and what can Wizards learn from Tempest block now we are returning to a similar set up? Can we make sense of the continuity between all these versions, and will I finally update the timeline? Lot's of things to do, so let's go and look at all of Rath block in one go!

Sort off.

Born to Greatness

Part one: Born to Greatness
Part two: The Beckoning Sky
Part three: Never to be Free
Written by J. Robert King
Appeared in The Duelist #29, 32 & 34.

SUMMARY
We start on a dark night, with a twelve year old Crovax reading a book about his favorite hero: Lord Windgrace. Suddenly he hears singing coming from his dad's parlor. He's not only forbidden from entering there, but it is said to be haunted by a ghostly hag. With his head still full of adventure stories he goes in anyway, and discovers an amulet. When he picks it up Selenia appears, who says she has to obey the owner of the amulet. A random comment from the young boy makes the angel smile, and that smile seems to be enough to get him to fall in love with her. Being a kid he first tries to command Selenia to be happy, but she tells him she can't be truly happy until she is free. Crovax immediately tries to find something hard to break the amulet, but stops when he sees the bust of his father. He vows instead to free her when he is a man and can stand up to his father.

The Art of Magic the Gathering: The Rath Cycle

As this is one of the few books I do not have in my personal collection, let me start by giving many thanks to reader, commenter and occasional spellchecker Leonardo for providing me with the opportunity to do this review!

REVIEW
I've been doing this blog for little over a year now, and looking back I see that I've deviated a lot from my original planning. Partially for fun reasons, like people lending me books or magazines I do not own, allowing me to review them anyway. Other times it was just real life getting in the way, leading to delays. It really annoys me when that happens, but it turns out some good did come from it, as I am now writing my reviews of the Rath stories around the time Battle for Zendikar block is current. Reviews the first block that told the story through the cards, kicked of an ongoing storyline and came with an art book, while Wizards has just returned to showing the story in the cards, kicks of their new ongoing storyline and released their second art book? (Even called "The Art of Magic the Gathering: Zendikar", as if it is part of a series alongside the work I'm looking at today!) It's all very serendipitous, and you can certainly expect a comparison between the two blocks in my Rath block wrap-up article!

So, let's make this review a little more topical and put it side by side Magic's newest publication. They both have gorgeous art and plenty of lore tidbits, and are each well worth your time. Zendikar gives more space to exploring the plane, while Rath Cycle gives more attention to the characters, which is to be expected. Currently we are just coming of a years long stretch in which worldbuilding was the primary job of the creative team, so obviously they'd want to show of the world. Plus the Weatherlight has a literal boatload of characters while the Gatewatch, so far, only has four. I think Rath Cycle is my favorite of the two, partially because of nostalgia, and partially because it makes extensive use of sketches and paintings from the style guide and comes with some interesting behind the scenes information from the designers. Zendikar only has a handful of arts not taken from the cards and is written much more from an in universe viewpoint. The downside of Rath Cycle is that it keeps a lot of backstory deliberately mysterious, saving it for future stories, whereas Zendikar goes into great detail on the backstory of the plane, the Eldrazi, the planeswalkers and the current story. It almost feels like an encyclopedia of the Zendikar story, whereas Rath Cycle is much more of a companion piece to all the other media outlets that the Weatherlight story appeared in.

And... what more is there to say? The art is beautiful, as you would expect of a Magic the Gathering product, and that alone is enough to make me want to track down the book anyway, despite no longer needing it for my project. Lorewise it is not essential, but does contain a number of interesting facts that I will cover below.

Rath and Storm

SUMMARY
The structure of this book is unique in the Magic canon. Technically it is, as the cover states, an anthology, with each individual story focusing on a different character and written by a different author. However, unlike all Magic's other anthologies, the stories together make up one big one covering the entirety of the Weatherlight's adventures on Rath. Everything is tied together with a framing sequence of a young boy called Ilcaster being told the saga by an old librarian, somewhere in the future. In these sequences the librarian also summarizes a bunch of stuff that was already covered in other versions of the story, like the flashbacks from Gerrard's Quest, or Starke re-joining the ship from Maelstrom.

Previously when I reviewed anthologies I discussed all of the stories separately. Here however, there is not much difference in the style of the stories. With everyone striving for pretty much the same tone and working from the same plot outline the individual quirks and favored tropes of the authors are not very noticeable. So this time I'll mostly just summarize the stories, before doing an overall review at the end.

Obviously we have already seen most of the plot here in the summary of Weatherlight and the storyboards of Tempest block in The Duelist (Here, here, here and here) and in Gerrard's Quest, but there's actually a lot added here, so it's worth taking a closer look.

Gerrard's Tale, by Michael Ryan
(At least, he's credited as that at the start of the story. In the blurb about him at the start he's called Michael G. Ryan, and in the list of authors at the back only as Mike Ryan.)

We already saw mister Ryan chronicle how Gerrard rejoined the crew in Torrent, but here he gets to do so again. This time we learn that Gerrard was training soldiers of the Benalish army, but that a guild of assassins was hiring his students out from under him. When Tahngarth tells him of Sisay's capture, he first has the minotaur help him solve this problem. In the end the master assassin is arrested and Gerrard gives the corrupt general that helped the assassins the opportunity to save his honor by committing suicide.

Gerrard's friend Pol Cordel is missing from this story, but contrary to what I remembered when I reviewed Torrent, the hourglass pendant does actually show up. Gerrard leaves it somewhere before leaving Benalia. That happens off screen, so the scenes with Pol could still have happened between the lines. Unfortunately that still leaves us with two contradictory scenes of how Gerrard and Tahngarth met. Here the minotaur turns up at his work, rather than Gerrard finding him about to clobber an annoying missionary.

Gerrard's Quest #1-4

 

"Separations" (no idea what that is to be honest) are just credited to "Dark Horse Digital" in the other three issues.

Before I get into the comic itself, my apologies for not updating the blog all that often in the past month. Work, the holidays and some personal stuff all took priority. For the foreseeable future I am planning to do a review every other week. That's not as often as I would like, but it would be nice to get back to some sort of regular schedule, and for now that means a slightly slower pace. Hopefully I'll be able to go back to weekly reviews in the future!

With that announcement out of the way... Gerrard's Quest!

SUMMARY
Issue one starts with the Weatherlight coming to Rath. Gerrard is mopey about having been manipulated all his life, and about the fact that people are probably going to die "because of him". He then flashes back to the day he left the Weatherlight, years before. Back then Volrath's forces had invaded Urborg and killed Crovax's father to draw the Weatherlight to them. In the subsequent battle Gerrard's friend Rofellos was killed by Gallowbraid. The baddies are chased of by Selenia, but the angel herself... well, after the battle Crovax destroys the artifact he used to summon her and she is also teleported to Rath, but whether it's Volrath's forces dragging her through a portal or whether the artifact was keeping her on Dominaria isn't entirely clear from the art. During the battle one of the minions called out Gerrard's name, which makes him realize the things were after him, not Crovax. He confronts Sisay over this, who reveals that her parents were allies of Gerrard's parents, as well as his adoptive dad Sidar Kondo and his mentor Multani. He learns that "Those who serve the Legacy" had been grooming him to destroy the Lord of the Wastes. Gerrard, mad at the deception and the death of his friend, quits. His flashback ends just in time for the final splash page that shows the Predator attacking.

The Duelist #27-30 (Exodus)

After all the stories, background lore and other cool stuff we've seen in the past year, suddenly it all seems to have dried up. We get another storyboard for Exodus, but it's only one page. There's no Dominian Chronicles. At first I presumed that it was because Exodus doesn't introduce any new part of Rath to chronicle, but then issue 28 is suddenly missing the Dominian FAQ as well, and a month later it is said Pete Venters has left Wizards. It's not officially announced, suddenly articles just talk about him having left. Maybe Pete leaving has something to do with the drying up of lore? Issue 29 does start Born to Greatness, the follow up to Sisay's Quest that shows how Crovax met Selenia, but as that story doesn't wrap up till issue issue 35, it will get its own review. So all in all, there's not much to talk about here.

Well, except for all the advertisements and announcements! It seems that after the success of The Brothers' War Wizards really doubled down on the novel line, promising two trilogies of stories plus some other interesting publications in the next year! Things didn't quite play out as planned though, so this review will be partly a preview of things to come and partly a look at what might have been. So maybe it was just decided that novels were a better way of presenting stories than The Duelist had been.

To give this review a bit more substance, I've also included a look at the online coverage of Rath block. I'll spoil now that it's mostly a summary of the main story, similar to the storyboards we've already seen, but there is some cool background info on the main characters in there.