Dark Engine - Whats going on?

Dark Engine #1

Dark Engine is written by Ryan Burton, art by John Bivens, letters by Crank! and published by Image Comics. I picked up Dark Engine because the cover is just awesome, I was expecting a bad-ass, barbarian woman kicking ass with a huge bone sword but what I got was demons, dinosaurs, something about spores, time travel and exploding hippos. needless to say I was confused.

Dark Engine begins with grotesque creatures, called sporedevils, waiting for the "one that birthed their world" suddenly cut to a woman exploding out of a T-rex taking one of its ribs as a sword, suddenly she then proceeds to slaughter numerous dinosaurs. We learn that the woman's name is Sym and that she was created and sent back in time using "obscene magic" to stop the world from being overtaken by the sporland in a conversation between a man named Paul and his concubine(?). Paul then suddenly leaps from his tower to his death.

The art uses thick outlines going for a grotesque look that it does very well but seemingly the only colour used in this comic are red because almost every page has some sort of blood soaked imagery. I have no problem with violence or blood but having the main character randomly slaughtering dinosaurs for 9 pages of a 23 page comic really just seems like a bit much. It strikes me that the inspiration for Dark Engine was somebodies sketchbook with a story shaped around the art rather than the art shaped around the story.

In issue #1 there has been no chance to find out anything about the characters including Sym who all we know was created to be a killing machine. This back story is given to us by a character who immediately commits suicide after delivering the little information the reader gets, so lets hope he wasn't important.

Boom!

Usually you need to give a new series two or three issues before you can make a solid judgement on a comic and yes I will probably pick up the trade but I was rather underwhelmed by #1. Dark Engine has a fantastic cover that just looks like it will tell an epic tale but so far we've had slaughtered dinosaurs and a woman urinating in the woods.

Maybe the artist just really hates dinosaurs?

I give Dark Engine 2 out of 5 bone swords.

Find out more about Dark Engine here.