Wednesday, March 16, 2011

Webcomic Review: The Phoenix Requiem

Alright, my evil British Lit paper is done and only one review to write today, clearly this is a good day. Oh and thanks to Everblue for linking to these reviews, my pageview count just shot up and I hope you guys find some other awesome webcomics to follow!


The Phoenix Requiem
Unlike many of the comics I've reviewed before, this one is almost done! I'd be surprised if the comic runs more than a month longer actually but all that means is that new readers don't have to worry about catching up to the comic and can take it at their own pace. Set in a Victorian-inspired world with supernatural elements (namely a war seven hundred years ago between the spirits and hellions where both sides were vanished and the world lost it's magic), everything seems calm in the village of Esk where Anya, a doctor in training, a regular workaholic. Then on a regular winter's day, a young man named Jonas appears on the edge of the village on the brink of death and Anya manage to save his life. Romance begins to follow but with a plague brewing and Jonas demonstrating some non-Earthly powers life is about to get a bit more hectic. The art here is very lovely, originally cell-shaded the old pages have been recolored and now the style resembles a Victorian painting much more so I'm hoping to get a copy of the first book sometime (it's even published by the same people who do The Meek and Lackadaisy Cats) since it's very nice to look at. The plot flows well and has some very nice plot twists that I didn't see coming at all which is always fun. There's a good deal of romance in this story, which is usually a turn off for me, but seems to work well enough here, although it does make me worry for the ending a little bit...


Funny enough, this is the webcomic that really got me started on webcomics back in September 2009. Sure I'd read a few before but I started this one when I was feeling a bit out of it (I was getting over something, my mom still swears it was swine flu), blazed through the whole comic so far in one go, went to the links page, bookmarked every comic there and then slowly read through all of those and, for the ones I liked, bookmarked all the comics in their links pages and repeated the process. I probably glanced at 200-ish comics over a month and eventually narrowed it down to something more like 40/50 that update weekly. So thanks to this series for showing me that some webcomics do actually update on a regular basis without sacrificing plot or artwork in the process, I didn't believe it was possible before this one!


EDIT: Heh, the last two pages went up just hours after I posted this review and I think I'm happy with the ending (and too lazy to change the review to past tense, heh).