This is exactly how I felt reading Murky World by Richard Corben.
Plunging into the what I can only assume is the “Murky World,” we meet our protagonist Tugat, a man looking for his horse until things get really weird.
The book does a lot of things that are pretty ambitious for a comic book. Like, as I said, not trying to explain anything that’s happening and just letting you see it happen. This was very cool to experience.
I liked being able to just pick up the story with no foreknowledge of its contents and just read something that was unexpected. Then again, it also threw me off to have no idea what was going on. I got confused easily, had to go back and re-read sections.
I won’t say the storytelling is sloppy, because it isn’t, but there doesn’t seem to be a lot of care placed into the story’s beats. While it seems to detail a sort of Day in the life of a weary traveler in a Conan-esque world it still seems pretty bizarre by those standards.
The art is interesting. I’m a sucker for no color in a comic and this comic doesn’t seem to do handle it in the style you’d expect. Without using very dark and bold black inks and focusing more on the pencil shades it’s pretty cool to see Corben going back to his roots and not just throwing out another all inked book.
There are plenty of monsters in this book for you, too. Not just a couple, but quite a few and they look pretty crazy. Corben has a really peculiar style of drawing his characters. He presents them almost as caricatures of what you’d expect from something of that type be it a cyclops, zombie, necromancer, etc.
I really dig the presentation of this story and would really like to see more of it. Corben has created a pretty vast world in just 25 pages that I can tell there’s a lot more to this story and this character than we’re getting in this lone one-shot. I also want to see the way he’d handle other monsters of this style of world, considering he tackles some you wouldn’t expect in this one, his take should be the next step should this book continue.
It feels so much like a Robert Howard Conan story and I think going in to the book with just that in mind and knowing nothing else about the content you’ll have a lot of fun reading it.
Murky World hits shelves today, February 8th, pick it up at your local comic shop!
