The Forged vol. 2: Home Sweet Home

From the far reaches of space, where they confronted some very angry sentient alien life, to the court of the Eternal Empress, the Forged team known as Scimitar-3 made quite the jump at the end of vol. 1.  Fortunately their capricious Empress is happy to get the chance to see one of the combat units dedicated to her up close and after some debriefing, the entirety of Scimitar-3 is cleared for some well-deserved shore leave.  While they’re relaxing, General Davian, who was in charge of Victory’s debriefing, has to figure out how to deal with this new threat to the empire.  The problem is that the other Generals who Davian works with have their own ideas about how the Empire-destabilizing news of sentient alien life must be dealt with.

While I have no new news to report as to whether “The Forged” represents “Warhammer 40K”-lite, I can say that vol. 2 is a definite step up from vol. 1.  Even if it doesn’t have the threat of an alien invasion driving it, this second volume does a much better job of giving us a sense of who the members of Scimitar-3 are, as well as doing general worldbuilding for what their Empire represents.  Co-writers Greg Rucka and Eric Trautmann make seeing what the various members of this team get up to on shore leave a good deal of fun while also setting up intriguing plot threads for future volumes.  Not the least of which is represented by General Davian and his ruthless stance on not doing the stupid thing in regards to this new threat to the Empire.

Though the writing is also improved from the previous volume, the art from Mike Henderson is still more serviceable than anything else.  It’s solid work when it comes to the storytelling, but it still doesn’t feel worthy of the oversized, European-album-emulating format that this series is reprinted in.  Henderson’s work lacks the detail that would make perusing it in an oversized format worthwhile, and I’d rather see it presented in a regular-sized comics format (and see $5 knocked off the cover price as a result).  Still, vol. 2 does represent an overall jump in quality that makes following the further adventures of the Scimitar-3 team more worthwhile than it initially appeared.