Umbral #10 Review

Written by: Antony Johnston

Art by: Christopher Mitten

Publisher: Image

Umbral has been one of the most well-written, creative, and outright surprising books on the stands since it debuted ten months ago. Unfortunately, Image publishes approximately a million books right now and the majority of them are worth your time and hard-earned money.

So, how can anyone decide what to buy when it’s literally “all good?” You should be reading Umbral if you like: fantasy, magic, beautiful artwork, huge and well-developed worlds, full-page maps to reveal said worlds (maps!), characters with real flaws and tics, and a female lead character who is tough, smart, and maybe the only hope for a distant kingdom under siege by shadow monsters. You like all or most of those things, right? Of course you do. Right now, you’re visiting a website called We the Nerdy.

Just another day in the Umbral

After the last couple of exposition heavy issues, we get a bit of a breather this month. I loved those past issues because they gave Johnston and Mitten a chance to pull the curtain back on their story. We now know what the Calamity was, how the Umbral were created, and we got some more details about how ‘mist’ works and why it’s necessary in this strange land. This issue uses all of those newly revealed details to further the story along. Dalone, both in old man and “young tough wizard in the Umbral form,” continues to train Rascal in the ways of magic. Rascal is learning more about the Umbral world, but within is a danger lurking that even Dalone isn’t aware of yet. Dalone claims, again, that he was there 500 hundred years ago when the Orbis Protegus was placed over the pit, yet it’s not in any of the history books. Now we have unreliable histories and narrators! This feeling of distrust has been sewn by Johnston since issue one, it is a creeping feeling that is no doubt going to come to head soon. Rascal is already keeping secrets from her party, and even as a lowly reader, I feel like I’m in on the dark secrets of the Umbral. What an awesome trick this comic has played on me! I’m behind the scenes of all of the treachery and I’m not even sure I should be here, like a person off the street who stumbles behind the stage and is told to take care of the props.

Johnston is a master world builder (see Wastleand, The Fuse, the Dead Space video game for more proof) and he seems to be really letting loose here. Dalone also discovers a new city through the Umbral in this issue, so I can’t wait to find out why that place is so interesting. Jordan Boyd, the colorist on the book, has also earned a special call-out because his work places Umbral in a whole new league. Wasteland also features Mitten on art duty, but it’s his pencils along with Boyd’s colors that are turning this book into perhaps the best thing Johnson and company have produced so far, and certainly in the top-5 of the current Image books. High praise, but I stand by it. Imagine Game of Thrones (the show, as I haven’t read the novels) but with a tighter cast, more magic, an infinite budget, and a writer who is producing quality work every month. That’s Umbral and that’s only one of the reasons you should be reading it.