Broken Frontier

This spiritual heir to Battle Chasers presents a unique vision that isn't quite fulfilled.

Since news of its release, I have eagerly awaited issue #1 of Skye Runner, all the time looking forward to reading the book that I view as one of the spiritual heirs of the long-dormant Battle Chasers. The fact that Skye Runner is also a product of WildStorm leads to inevitable comparisons with Battle Chasers, yet this book is set in a unique and vividly imagined world.

In the book’s opening, the delightfully mischievous children Gunold and Minno are out hunting, looking to "bag a bipper." Exactly what a "bipper" is, I couldn’t tell you, but you can be sure that they are creatures that bring great trouble! The kids catch something, but not exactly the same type of beast they were after in the first place…

We are then introduced to sisters Lynn and Skye, the story’s protagonist, as well as Gallan a princely guy who summons Skye at the request of his father.

Similarly to Monika in Battle Chasers, Skye is a "well-developed" girl who walks around in next to nothing and, intentionally or not, Warner’s script makes light of her dress sense in a way that reads as a somewhat silly lampooning of the whole "bad girl" image that runs through comics. This is particularly daft as Skye’s appearance merely perpetuates the trend the script seems to be attacking.

Through Skye’s discussions with the old man, Sir Walter, we learn about the state of the world and the knights that protect this "tiny village on the edge of nowhere." Things are not as they always were…Skye too was once royalty, daughter of a dead king who led a mighty army. Now, her place in the world is not so grand.

Throughout much of this book, Skye is a character trying desperately to live up to her father’s ideals – to do so, she must challenge the very gods themselves. But challenging the rulers of the heavens takes its toll and lands Skye in a great deal of trouble.

Skye Runner is an ambitious debut, but... I’ll get to the "but" shortly.

Throughout parts of Warner’s script you get the sense that something much grander is afoot than the seeming troubles of Skye and her sister Lynn…The greater issue is one that seems to be winding itself about Skye, drawing her down a path of destiny greater than she ever thought to be following.

So, in some respects, Skye Runner is very reminiscent of the majority of tales in the fantasy setting. It is in trying to ascend this archetypical setting and the characters that populate it that Skye Runner falls into trouble. Warner’s script doesn’t craft anything substantial enough on which this aspiration can be built. The story, dragged along by text heavy captions, is a little confusing and contains a particularly jarring shift which occurs on page 15.

Suddenly, we seem to be in a whole new story of gods and monsters that bears little connection to what has gone on before. Whether this section of the story takes place in the future or in a different timeline, I couldn’t be sure. This twist takes you out of the world that you were just previously putting together and thrusts you into a place and time that the reader just doesn’t have the information to understand. It is very unnerving, particularly when it occurs half way through an introductory issue.

However, to their credit, Warner and Garza have worked together to design a vivid world that is lush, vibrant and very, very alien. The creatures that inhabit Skye’s world, from the seemingly harmless bipper to the gods themselves are uniquely designed.

Garza’s art is not as manga-influenced as Madureira’s, to which it may be compared, but his fluid style and design sense stamp the world of Skye Runner as being very unique. Of particular note are the gods, monstrous behemoths that are very distinctly Skye Runner – I have certainly never seen creatures like them before.

Rounding out the art team, Friend does a solid job on the inks, smoothly adding weight to Garza’s lush art and Charalampidis splashes out on vibrant, exciting colors.

Skye Runner has great potential to be a wonderful fantasy book. However, its heavy reliance on cliché, its verbose captions alluding to a grander scheme that is always out of reach and jarring leaps in the narrative let the book down.

Still, it is intriguing enough for me to stick around for future issues in the hope that the scripts will be tighter and more focused.