Nocturnal Essence: Blood, Fate, and Silver Book II
Written and Illustrated by: Lance Stahlberg and Danika Kenn
Released by: Rogue Wolf
If you were to judge a book by its cover then from this one you’d figure it was the CIA battling army rangers, with weird creatures with glowing eyes in the background. Beyond that…you know I’m not really sure. I approached the book with some trepidation because big battle type books aren’t really my type of thing, but I figured I’d give it a try. This is the second book in the series and in this case it’s important to know, because the story starts off with a bang.
This issue jumps right into action mode with a young woman being watched through the scope of a rifle…about to be shot. She jumps aside barring fangs and springs to attack. Meanwhile other armed men make it into the bar and begin shooting at everyone and everything that moves. And there’s a lot of shooting, both at the bar and some other unnamed location. And then the werewolves and vampires appear, some fighting each other, some fighting other enemies. All seeking the same mystical treasure.
Honestly it’s a bit hard to make out what the heck is going on in this issue. It’s the second issue so I would hope that the first issue has a good bit of the introduction to who the characters are, but here you just have to jump in and try to figure out what’s going on. And it’s really difficult. You get introduced to characters at such a rapid pace that it’s often hard to figure out which person is part of which group…or even why they’re fighting each other. I feel like we need name tags and affiliation stickers on each character to figure out what’s going on. Even the couple of character profiles that make it into the issue don’t help too much. As long as you look past not knowing who is affiliated with who the story is actually pretty well told. It has a nice pace to it and keeps moving.
The artwork in this issue is strictly black and white line drawings with some shading to them. It reminds me a lot of the artwork you see coming from Terry Moore, the guy that does “Strangers in Paradise.” It has a really nice quality to it and the artist does and excellent job at capturing the human form and human emotion. The later I find particularly important because it’s important to be able to look at the illustrations and figure out what the heck is happening with the characters and the artist succeeds with that. The one thing that I don’t like is that the book is about 5 x7 so it’s pretty small. And the artwork has a number of panels to it…and when viewed at this size it feels like it was compressed a bit to fit the pages which mean some of the details get lost and the overall page layout feels overwhelming in places. There isn’t enough gutter space between the panels and they start blurring together and the overall page looks like nothing, but action. I wish they had made the issue slightly larger as I think it would have really helped make the artwork stand out even more.
I’d recommend this series to fans of Anita Blake, True Blood, and Underworld fans, especially the last two groups. It has that same kinda of vibe to it and as long as you pick it up in the beginning you can figure out what’s going on…hopefully. It’s not my favorite type of series and I really do wish they had made it a slightly larger format to show off the artwork…but I’d read another issue…as long as it’s the first one so I can figure out what’s going on.
