Dark Knights of Steel: Allwinter

For twenty-one years the Allwinter has cursed the northern lands under an unending torrent of snow and cold.  That hasn’t been enough to drive mankind from them, nor has it gotten them to stop fighting over it.  Jarl Vandar “Vandal” Savage leads one of the largest kingdoms in these frozen tundra, thanks to the man who will accept any job for the right amount of coin:  Deathstroke.  So it’s no matter for the hired hand to agree to capture a threat to Vandal’s kingdom, described as a monster who threatens to unmake everything he’s done.  Except that it turns out that someone from Deathstroke’s past is minding this “monster” who may have the power to save everyone in these forsaken lands instead.

This first spinoff from “Dark Knights of Steel” comes from writer Jay Kristoff and artist Tirso, and it’s eminently skippable.  If you’re like me and enjoyed seeing familiar DC characters in a new setting that showcased their personalities and abilities in new and interesting ways, then this has two good moments of that.  The rest of it has Deathstroke slogging through a familiar bad guy regrets his life’s choices and seeks redemption story which plays out exactly as you’d expect.  Tirso does deliver some appealingly hard-edged and violent fantasy art, with some clever uses of color sprinkled throughout, but it’s not enough to get me to recommend this to anyone beyond the most committed fans of the original maxiseries.

I’m at least glad that this collection included the “Heir to the Sea” backup stories from the original serialization, which saves me the trouble of buying the upcoming one-shot that collects them.  This is from original “Dark Knights” writer Tom Taylor, with great painterly art from Riccardo Federici and it tells the story of the first superhuman that Jonathan and Martha Kent encountered back when they were soldiers best known as The Butchers of Rothfus.  While it’s not good enough to redeem the whole package, it has a lot more of the charm and surprise that got me invested in this world which bodes well for its sequel if nothing else.