'The Mercenary #1: The Cult of the Sacred Fire' by Vicente Segrelles is part of a 40th anniversary of the writer/artists work. What I found inside was gorgeous painted art and an unusual fantasy world.

The mercenary is on a job to save a woman being held hostage. She is in a cage, and like many of the women in this work, she is naked. After he saves her, she tries to convince the mercenary not to take her back to her husband, but he does anyway. The husband sensing betrayal casts the mercenary out of his home in the clouds. The mercenary lands in a world below the clouds where another woman is being held hostage.

The story feels like something I would have read in the magazine Heavy Metal. The world building is unusual and unique enough to have held my interest. The artist's work drawing for engine manuals inform such details as the ropes and pulleys holding up a balloon city. In an afterword about the artist, I learned this as well as his thoughts on other designs, like creating 2-legged dragons instead of four. The work was a good read, and the painted pages add to the richness of this strange world.

I received a review copy of this graphic novel from NBM Publishing, Papercutz, and NetGalley in exchange for an honest review. Thank you for allowing me to review this graphic novel.

If Frank Frazetta created a comic, it would probably look like this. The art has that classic Conan painted cover feel to it. The stories are kind of the same and the book feels a little too damsel in distress-y.

As suspected, this is wonderful to look at, and less so to read. It harks back to the naive fantasy of the 1960s and 1970s, where the hero cannot do anything but stumble upon, and break the hearts of, lovely naked women all the time. Our hero here gets to engage with three such ladies, who have different fates at this author's hands, but it's the weird, liminal, ephemeral world where everyone lives that will stick in the mind. Here are valleys of dragon-riders in cities above the clouds, and here floating cities populated by all-female cults, and so on. And as intriguing as all that may sound, it's still a bit cheesy to the modern reader - a cheesiness which is heightened by the hero having the hairstyle of a 1970s accountant, for some reason. I don't know if I'd come back for more issues of the same - the stories have only their pulpiness to offer; but that artwork does act as a compelling, five-star-worthy selling-point.

Not quite what I was expecting. Love the old-fashioned art style though.

So I went in blind on this not having heard of the mercenary before but unfortunately it just wasn't my style of graphic novel. I found the art tried to fit in female nudity whenever possible which to be honest didn't actually do anything to the story, the characters could have been in snow suits and still the story would be the same so I felt it was just a little over the top.

I also felt there was no introduction to the story or characters so for most of the book I did not know who the mercenary was or what he was doing let alone why he was doing it.

There was possibility for an exciting world and interesting stories but it read a little like a paper back seventies porno book ignoring opportunities and filling them with nudity and bad dialog.

First, let me say, this really is georgously illustrated, with painted art, rather than the usual ink, that is then colored. This volume was first published 40 years ago, just after the Spain became a democracy. (Which most Americans would remember as the Saturday Night Routine about Franco being still dead). One of the things about becoming a democracy, after being a dictatorship is that everything is open, and Spain, not being a Puritan based country, was very, very open to beautiful nudes, as Vicente points out in his afterward.

Yes, the men are men here, fat, fit, bald, young, and old, but all the women are buxom and mostly nude. And when they are not nude, they are as near to nude as you can get, and none of them need bras.

The story is good, once you get past all the women running around with barely anything on, while they are being rescued, or fighting, or just running. The hero is a Conan type, and just goes from fight to fight, but is skilled at what he does.

If you like good sword and scorchey type books, and don't mind women running around half naked, you might enjoy this. It isn't sexist, and the women aren't stupid, just clothless.



Thanks to Netgalley for making this book available for an honest review.