Darken

By Kate Ashwin
www.darkencomic.com

I feel like it’s been ages since I’ve read a fantasy comic set in some indistinct period in the past/another world that is not as technologically advanced as ours. I’m sure it hasn't been that long, but other than Order of the Stick I can’t think of any.

According to a note from Ashwin at the beginning of this comic, this is an except from a longer story about a group of evildoers who have set out to conquer the world. Here one of them, a thief named Casper, steals a bottle with a djinn in it. The djinn plans on fulfilling the standard wishes someone asks for (wealth and so forth), but doing them in such a way that it would teach the thief a lesson.

Unfortunately for the djinn Casper is unrepentantly terrible. The money he gets turns out to be from nuns (who cares?) and an orphanage (Casper wishes he’d known they had money so that he could have robbed them earlier), and so forth.

While the story was cute, and I liked the art (I enjoyed the djin's design), I didn’t really like the dialogue very much. It seemed sort of stilted and anachronistic. I’m sure that’s the style Ashwin is going for, but Casper sounded more like an Australian (he keeps saying “mate”) than anything else, and for some reason this bothered me.