07-24-07

Evil is...
...as evil does, or so they say.  What they don't say, is that evil is extremely difficult to write.  "Evil" characters always seem to come off as cartoonish megalomaniacs, or small-minded thugs, or both.  God forbid the authors gain any sort of sympathy for them, because then they devolve into whiny, neurotic shadows of evil.  Wolverine spending half his time telling everyone how he's the best he is at what he does but that he doesn't do it any more because it's wrong.  Drizzt trapped in a world that hates and fears him because he's too sensitive and thoughtful for the dominatrix-fantasy world he comes from.  Ras al Gul wasting thousands of words on rhetoric explaining how his megalomaniacal genocide attempts are actually good for the human race.  These are the faces of sympathetic evil.

Except in Darken, by Kate Ashwin.  Based on a story by Mike Foulks, the world of Darken is inhabited by characters all loosely representing the various shades of the "Evil" alignment in the Dungeons and Dragons game.  None of them are whiny, only one is cartoonishly thuggish.  All of them are remarkably sympathetic.  It's a good trick, and one rarely even attempted.  Bioware took a half-assed attempt at it in their alternate storyline for the NeverWinter Nights 2 game, but that, of course, resulted in a lot of whining, especially by...well, it's hard to award the most-whiny prize in that one so let's just stop at "a lot of whining."  Darken is not NeverWinter Nights 2, by any stretch of the imagination.

The comic starts with lead protagonist (and only cartoonishly evil character) Gort being killed and dragged to hell by a demon servant of Mephistopholes.  Mephisto makes a deal with Gort; he needs an earthly servant to find and wield some very powerful artifacts in his name, so he can overcome the top devil in hell, Asmodeus.  Gort is all over that, since it means having more power than any other mortal man ever.  Quick cut to the drow city of Ilnarsis, which is being attacked by a sort of worm-thing (in a strictly D&D-based world, it would  be a cross between a purple worm and a carrion crawler).  It's just eaten (or crushed, or slimed) much of the city guard, and the only survivor is a young drow named Komiyan Zaibach.  After he reports the disaster to his general, he is sent to "protect" the high priestess while she sacrifices random city-dwellers in an attempt to have their god Mephistopholes send them some deliverance from the worm.  She decides that Komy would make just as good a sacrifice as anyone else (as was the general's intent), and wrongly assumes he'll just stand there and wait while she gets ready to gut him.  He doesn't.  And Gort is returned to the world.

This all happens in the first ten or so pages of the comic.  Needless to say, Gort makes short work of the worm-thing, and he and Komy set off to fulfill Gort's mission.  At first, they gather Gort's old adventuring group, a half-dragon cleric named Mink and Casper, a human thief.  In later adventures, they trip over a former associate named Jill, a self-employed assassin-cum-courtesan, and a werebear.  The bear, Michaelus, is the only character in the group who is not definably evil, which makes since when you considered that my old D&D Monster Manual describes werebears as Chaotic Neutral or Good.

The rest, however, are extremely evil.  No, make that Evil, with a capital bold-faced "e".  It's an evil you can understand; it's the sort of evil you indulge in when you've played through the "good" options of a role-playing game.  They don't ride haphazard through the countryside shouting "Die! Die! Die!!!" (well, okay, Gort does, sometimes), but you are never particularly surprised or disappointed when one of them stabs someone in the back, or double-crosses a too-trusting dragon.  They do the things that normal people consider doing but don't.  They are all, with the exceptions of Komy, Casper, and Michaelus, completely self-interested, and their actions betray that.

And yet, they're all likeable.  Even Gort is at least as likeable as the various "Mike" characters that plague the webcomics world, if not more so, because he's not slouching around with a bunch of goody-two-shoes who make his abrasively thuggish behavior necessary, and force him to apologize for being who he is.  He's surrounded by people who are just as evil and willing to kill as he is, and he's still a mouthy thug.  And it's just as annoying to his evil comrades as it would be to a save-the-world collection.  But you still find yourself rooting for him, because, as bad as he is, the people he faces are infinitely worse.

The art begins badly, in that pseudo-manga style where every profile has more muzzle than nose, but it quickly develops to not-bad, and imperceptibly evolves to pretty damn good.  Ashwin's art is vaguely reminiscent of Joe England's work in the later Zebra Girl comics, but more as a recognizable influence than anything else.  Her style is definitely all her own, and it works.

The writing is spot-on.  Possibly because she is working with a complete story, Ashwin avoids the pitfalls of random side-arcs and presents a story that very definitely leads the reader from one point to the next with definable purpose.  Her dialogue is believable, and evil-villain monologues are kept to a minimum.  More amazingly, she is working within the D&D framework, and has never broken the third wall.  Her characters, unlike the characters in so many other RPG-based comics, live in the world of Darken, not on a page in some geek's basement.

Although the language is mostly clean, and the gore is very minimized, I probably wouldn't recommend this to someone with children, if only because it glories in evil.  Evil, by its very nature should be suppressed, if only because a world where evil is ascendant is a world where societal institutions fall apart.  But if you're an adult and aren't likely to be persuaded to the dark side by a comic, don't miss Darken.  It's worth your time.

Darken by Kate Ashwin (Based on a story by Mike Foulks)
Updates:  MT(+)
Caveats:  Evil protagonists, D&D-based plot
Rating: