Aaaaalright then, let's get this rolling ... Was Du Heute Kannst Besorgen Productions proudly presents:
The Sword Interval(
Homepage -
Start) by Benjamin Fleuter (who first got into my sights with
Derelict, another comic that he, alas, dropped unfinished).
Status: The Sword Interval has
completed in 2020, totaling 240 "episodes" (
no way to call them "pages", make sure your mouse's scroll wheel works!) of (mostly) monster/ghost hunter business. Which should explain why I said that it's rather close to the topics of SSSS.
In order not to give too much away, I shall restrict myself to the
official synopsis: "The Sword Interval is about a world on the verge of a supernatural apocalypse. Most of humanity goes about their daily lives trying to ignore the constant threat of magic and monsters, but a few face these dangers head-on. Fall is one such person. She has left behind the sheltered safety of the paranormal witness protection program in order to hunt down the monster that killed her family."
Rating /
Content Warnings: Well, it's a
monster hunter comic, so you can take violence, blood, gore, death, other
interesting side effects of getting into supernatural altercations, and characters being rather indifferent to all of that (and raising a couple entire bottles to it) for granted; none of that is depicted in an overly graphic way, though. IMHO. The situation later grows near outright apocalypse, and some full-fledged treason by good guys is being found out.
Art: ... I'm probably not the right person to try and judge that, as I don't have much of an idea what makes the difference between "supports the story" and "GREAT stuff!!" for artwork - it's
somewhere there, however. Much more
ligne claire than Minnas works, at least, so there tends not to be as much "unclear because blurred out when we 'saw' it" about the monsters. Plenty of
details to discover, too - the "Liches Get Stitches" patch Fall had on the motorbike jacket she had for
one sub-arc pretty much took a life of its own in the merchandising IIUC.
Why I liked it: For starters, I seem to have a knack to see a story presented in those "episodes", which pack a good deal more plot advancement than usual pages. (One'd expect me to
wait on comics to have run up several pages before catching up, then, I suppose, but apparently, I'm too greedy for that.
) Then there's the
strangely familiar topic, complete with a plot that
continually got worse, drawing most of the hunters from an initial "meh, it's a living, for now at least" all the way to "okay, we're looking at
apocalype finally happening and the prep we thought humanity had is a joke, so what do we do
now". Plus the occasional wit and sarcasm showing up ("That means you, Ms. Torres."), character growth, and various interesting monster designs (some traditional, some not).
