I’m still reading my way through the PDF issues provided by the good people behind the indie comic Sentinel (see also issues 1 & 2, 3 & 4) and I’m still impressed at how the team’s been keeping up a good level of variety while remaining within their general retro-eighties remit.
In issue 5, regular writer Alan Holloway partners with co-plotter Chris Atkins and artist Ed Doyle for the comic’s first (and so far only) full-colour issue. The story is a traditional sword-and-sorcery outing in which a Schwarzenegger-esque hero teams up with a local blacksmith to save a village from demons. The comic owes a good deal to Frank Frazetta iconography; but it also borrows a few leaves from Ray Harryhausen’s book with an army of skeletons, particularly the skeleton army.
Issue 6 is a collaboration between Alan Holloway and newcomer Morgan Gleave, who brings a bold and stylised style of cartooning to the series. In terms of story, the issue jumps from the straight-faced sword-and-sorcery of the previous instalment to something rather sillier: the main character teams up with a talking dog whose family is being picked off by an extremely vengeful cat.
That covers all of the Sentinel issues presently available, but as I type, a seventh issue is currently doing rather well on Kickstarter…
Doris V. Sutherland 