Thorgal The Invisible Fortress review

This volume starts immediately where the previous one, The Sun Sword, left off, with out titular hero and his companion journeying across lands and, as is always the way with these things, quickly getting into scrapes and adventures.
As I said in the previous review, I was unfamiliar with this series, and maybe because of that, I find myself yet again amazed by the storyline in here.
Obviously I’ll not go down the spoiler route here and tell you what happens, but I will say that it is a storyline and theme that is as opposite from the story in The Sun Sword as could possibly be.
Yet again, Jean Van Hamme proves himself to be the absolute master of storytelling. I found myself reading this book and thinking that it shouldn’t work. That combining the events in The Sun Sword and what goes on here should make for a crazy and nonsensical mish-mash of elements, but it works. It works brilliantly, in fact.
Van Hamme’s superlative writing is complemented perfectly by the incredible art by Grzegorz Rosinski.
There are some amazing scenes in here, and he transforms what I suspect were some very complex panel descriptions in the script into easily understandable images. The contrast between scenes of extreme detail and others where he uses blank white space is jarring and powerful.
Yes, yet again it’s another Cinebook volume that I loved. One day I’ll read a bad one… one day, but not today.

Western review

Now, you may or may not know this, but here at HiEx! We are big fans of the western genre- so this book would have to drop the ball in a pretty major way to be received badly!

So we can ponder how possible this is before plunging further into the review- It is published by Cinebook, written by Jean Van Hamme – who also wrote XIII, Largo Winch and Thorgal with art by Grzegorz Rosinski – who illustrated Thorgal. You just know this is going to  be good already, don’t you?

And of course you would be right. It is quite brilliant.

The art is equisite. It is painted in warm sepia tones and cool blues, giving the whole book a lovely ‘old world’ feel. The only strong, sold colour in the book is the bright red blood that accompanies any acts of violence and serves to add to their impact. And these pages are broken up by the occasional magnificent fully painted double page spread, which serves as a chapter break and sets the scene nicely for what is about to follow.

The story itself is self contained- this book is a one shot- so you have no need to worry about picking up further volumes after this one. That’s not to say you will not want any, of course!

The narrative is as twisty as you would expect from Van Hamme, and has a pitch black streak running through it. The Old West was tough, so don’t expect this to have one of those endings where they all go off into the sunset together!

So yet again, Cinebook have delivered the good with yet another classic slice of comics. It’s almost getting tedious..!