Broken Frontier

Gabrielle, Xena, Joxer and Autolycus are the chosen of the Greeks – chosen to battle the Egyptian gods’ champions in a battle royale to the finish!

Writer John Layman has chosen to whip out an intriguing, pleasantly grandiose epic for the series’ opening arc, one in which two different cultural pantheons battle it out for supremacy. It seems the Greek and Egyptian gods are no longer on friendly terms, and their long, protracted war is causing more casualties amongst their respective believers than either side can afford. Enter: our eponymous heroine and her usual entourage of sidekick, jester, and lying, conniving (but oddly loyal) thief. The two pantheons have come to an agreement – in order to spare the time and lives an ongoing war would bring, they’ve decided to each select a small number of proxies and have the tussle between these few determine the ultimate victor. Of course, nothing is so simple, as the Egyptian champions far surpass Xena’s own strength, Anubis executes a coup d’état of Hades, and a very familiar blonde lady makes a startling comeback.

The cornball humor of the television show – the factor that made it such an unexpectedly captivating, can’t-take-your-eyes-off-it phenomenon – is executed with only relative success by Layman. The central problem is that such humor worked well within the televised series primarily due to the camp quality of actual, flesh-and-blood actors delivering such outlandish, contextually absurd conversation. Reading the same formula of bad puns and vaudevillian set-up shticks on comic book stock (colorful as it is), winds up as only moderately amusing. Comics have a long history of dialogue and situational melodramatics that, if taken off the page and put into the mouths of actual people, turns them quickly comical, no matter how seemingly straight forward the script when placed in word balloons on a comic book page. Yet reverse this process – take horrendously cheesy dialogue and place it back in a funny book – and their farcical impact is immediately lessened. Inside a comic, the dialogue seems passing familiar and overall par for the comic-book course; it might bring a smile to the lips, but, sadly, nothing comes across as laugh-out-loud, bwa-ha-ha uproarious. Not even once.

This being the case, the series’ primary strength lies in its potential to dish out tales that the low-budget TV series could never have supported. "Contest of Pantheons" is theoretically just such a tale, sweetly ambitious and epic, bringing in a full-on god war which is precisely the kind of over-the-top action the book needs. The execution, though, has thus far not been of the same, sufficient standard. Little actual action activity has yet to occur, and the little that has occurred is unimaginative, as if Layman were operating under the same budgetary constraints as the show. There is yet the possibly of great stuff to come – a horde of undead zombies led by Anubis, the title contest (which has yet to actually take place), the return of a well-loved archenemy – but if the following issues follow the style of these first two, then it likely won’t come across as terribly thrilling regardless.

Layman is teamed with a fantastically visceral artist: Fabiano Neves (of Chaos’ Purgatori and The Rock fame) whose current style is remarkably akin to Greg Land, with all of Land’s smooth realism and soft, sinister shadowing. Neves illustrates the characters with apt likenesses to the actors that portrayed them, likenesses which are inextricably linked to the fans’ archetypical idea of the book’s dramatis personae. Additionally, Neves’ art shows a massive potential for darker, more primeval, action-packed sequences, if only the script would grant him such a thing.

Xena: Warrior Princess as published by Dynamite Entertainment is a solid series, offering everything the source material once did, only for my money I’d like to see a hell of a lot more. Comics are arguably the greatest of the visual mediums precisely because they lack all the physical limitations that motion pictures and television perpetually struggle against. If Layman (and whoever else plies their trade on the book) can keep this in mind, and understand the inherent differences between sequential and cinematic storytelling, then Xena may become a more worthwhile endeavor. As it stands now, however, it’s only a comic for those who simply can’t stand to do without their Warrior Princess.