Cower not, fierce reader!
Oh, that’s been a long time. Today, I’m going to discuss The Mission of Joan of Arc from Voyage Comics. Voyage is a small Catholic publisher of comics, fiction, and essays. I’m going to divide this into 3 parts: the story, the art, and the union of writing and art.
The story
This is based on Joan of Arc’s life and death. The good here is that it is a worthy subject, and the writing is decent, if a little modern(gotta appeal to kids). My biggest fault here is that there’s not enough. There’s very little prologue to set up the story, and significant jumps in time, with little action in the tale, and while I don’t mind condensed battles or condensing the campaign, this misses that entirely. While this isn’t a military history, there should be some of that. Is it a religious biography? Somewhat, as it is inspired by the play by St. Therese on St. Joan of Arc. At any rate, I wanted more bits of the story, and both more of the military and religious aspect would be good.
The Art
I really have no complaints about the quality of the art. The style is perhaps a little too realistic for me, but this is a minor concern. Here are some samples(on the Voyage Comics website):
There’s a good level of detail, you can tell characters apart, even if you don’t know them, and the action there is is clear.
Union of Story and Art
This is a tough one, and I think this mostly succeeds. I think there’s a balance in audience appeal that should be addressed: kids should not be the only readers, nor the main ones. We should not avoid the hard discussions of violence of war, and we should be willing to confront the evils of the world. These are difficult to find the balance to portray in a way that presents honestly without glamorizing. I think the mark in this case was missed on the depiction of war. A show of ruined fields, of peasants starving or abused by soldiers, a little bit of the horrors of war would be helpful in this as a show of the strength of faith against it.
Overall, this is a good read, and it’s definitely safe for younger readers, though I would prefer one that maybe would prompt conversations about the difficult things. 7/10 fell deeds.
When you play Social Justice, the World loses.