Prophecy promo comic

Story - Scott McGough & Jess Lebow (based on the novel by Vance Moore)
Art - Kev Walker
First appeared in Top Deck #8

Okay, so... we've reached the third Kev Walker promo comic and I've officially run out of things to say about them. They are pretty, it's cool that they did these things back in the day, it's an adaptation of a scene from the novel but different enough that you can't consider it canonical... Keldons apparently look like Lobo sometimes.

This is what it's like being a completist. Sometimes there are things you just can't say anything interesting about, but you got to have them because they are part of whatever it is you collect.

I'll try to get the review of the actual novel up by Tuesday. At least there is actually something to talk about there!

Nemesis Online

SUMMARY
Ehm... this story is available online and it is less than a 1000 words long, so you're really better of just reading it, but if you insist on a summary...

Some Rathi rebels are fighting Stronghold forces and winning. But then a Laccolith Titan shows up and they start losing. But then a Parallax Wave happens and the Stronghold forces are swept away.

REVIEW
It's fine.

What, you want more? We are entering an age now where pretty much all of the story is put into the book line. Any other storyline source that get produced up until... jeez, the Kamigawa vignettes I guess, are really just fluffed up commercials for the books. Their writing is generally okay, but their size means there really isn't much to review. There simply isn't space to do anything special.

TRIVIA

• Skyshroud Elves thank Gaea. Which makes sense, as the Art of Rath book revealed Skyshroud originally drifted around the seas of Dominaria before it was scooped up and brought to Rath.
• "The Parallax" never came up in Nemesis, or anywhere else as far as I know. I'm guessing it is a side-effect of the coming Rathi overlay.

TIMELINE

Okay, here we actually do have something to discuss!

The elves talk as if Eladamri is still leading the rebellion, which suggest it happens during the Nemesis novel. Yet that seems unlikely. In that book it is a huge plot point that Crovax, despite being the strongest competitor for the title of Evincar otherwise, failed to score a victory against the rebels. If his forces had a second battle in which he almost won, only to lose his troops to the Parallax, that would most certainly have come up.

So I would say that the only explanation for this is that story takes place during Nemesis's epilogue, or shortly afterwards: before news of Eladamri's disappearance becomes widespread, but after Crovax is named evincar and is campaigning to secure his reign. This would also allow us to tie the Parallax to the Rathi overlay, since the overlay doesn't begin until the last few pages of the book.

Aaaaaaand... that's it! You've been warned, there will be more of these mini reviews in the future. Next up is the Prophecy promo comic, but after that it is back to a proper book! (Or, well, proper... it's still Prophecy...)

Nemesis

Writer - Paul B. Thompson
Cover art - Mark Zug
Released February 2000

SUMMARY
When the Weatherlight escaped Rath it left two crewmen behind: Crovax and Ertai. Ertai ended up on board skyship Predator, a prisoner of Greven il-Vec. It turns out that Crovax, already turned into a vampire, was brought to Phyrexia and further enhanced. He was then send to Phyrexia to be its new evincar, as Volrath had left to go star in Mercadian Masques. However, while a Phyrexian priest called Kirril worked on Crovax, an inner circle member called Abcal-Dro has the daughter of Eladamri, Avila, killed and used her body to create Belbe. Belbe is implanted with a device that allows Yawgmoth to see through her and is then also send to Rath as an emissary, to oversee the struggle for who becomes the new evincar. Abcal-Dro believes survival of the fittest is the best method of selecting a new ruler.

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.

The Lat-Nam Kerfuffle

It feels good to finally be writing this article. After all, I've been saying one day I would since pretty much the beginning of this blog. So after two years it is high time.

What are we talking about again? Well, way back during the Greensleeves cycle we were shown the destruction of the College of Lat-Nam during the Brothers' War. Recently we covered Jeff Grubb's Ice Age cycle, in which the College continued to exist until shortly after the Ice Age. It's a pretty major revision that intersects with a lot of other ret-cons. There is the nature of the Brothers, the City of Shadows, Lim-Dûl... but while in the cases of the Brothers and Lim-Dûl we simply have to let the old version go and accept the new facts, it's different with Lat-Nam. For starters, there is no book that outright replaces the Greensleeves trilogy. And it would be a real shame to chuck some of the oldest Magic novels out of continuity without a replacement just because some details in the backstory don't match up. Furthermore, while the facts from the two trilogies (and a bunch of other references that were made in between) don't match up, there is so much in-universe time between them that there could very well have been some off-camera events that would explain the apparent inconsistencies. We are talking gaps of centuries or even millennia!

So that's why we are here. To try and find a way to make it all fit together. But first, let's go through all the sources once more, in order of release, to refresh our memory of just what we are talking about.