Dark Horse Solomon Kane, you're sitting in the naughty chair

(Note: not for the squeamish, and also plenty of spoilers)

I was a bit disappointed with the first volume of Dark Horse's run on Solomon Kane, but the second volume is making me want to drop the title. This isn't any sort of review, mind. This is how I feel. Results not typical. If you feel strongly about it, you're more than welcome to.

My primary complaint is the gore. As an avid fan of the writer's work, I don't mind pints of squirting blood and lots of violent action. But after a point it just turns my stomach. It's always a line between telling a story and just being unnecessarily gruesome. In the first volume, guts are spilled in liberal measure, including one scene in which a man's intestines are apparently twisted around Kane's sword as he pulls it out. The real turning point for me came when a monster tears off a named female character's face near the end of the story. I can take most things, but gratuitously graphic violence towards women makes me sick.

In the second volume, the gore dial got ratcheted up to 11. Practically every scene in which a monster gets shot or stabbed resulted in copious amounts of hanging (and/or splattering) red viscera. And they do get shot and stabbed frequently. And it's not just the monsters. In one scene, a man gets the top of his head cut off and his brains spill out. In another, a woman has her neck twisted all the way around, breaking her spine. A man who falls from a second-story window breaks both legs into a shredded mess with the bones sticking out. Feel free to call me a sissy, but this feels excessive.

Both stories are based around original fragments written by Howard, in the same way the Conan series has been doing in some of the volumes. The first volume deals with the fragment "The Castle of the Devil," which originally never even goes as far as to establish what the real nature of the conflict is. The comic pretty much makes up the whole story, beyond it involving Kane, a wandering Englishman, and a sinister baron's castle around which he likes to string up children for supposed crimes. I actually liked this story. The supernatural mystery and tangled strings of motivations made it an entertaining read.

The second volume uses a full Kane story, "The Rattle of Bones," and another fragment, "Death's Black Riders." Contrary to what I would have expected, "The Rattle of Bones" makes up a single chapter, surrounded by the fairly flat story built from the fragment. They really base it on a single line from the two page fragment: "They swept on, horse and rider a single formless black object like some fabulous monster." In this story, this is literal: the enemies are misshapen, vaguely centaurlike monsters. They're attacking people for reasons never clearly explained. It's suggested they were summoned by a gypsy to fight off bandits, but they stick around apparently just because they'd like a Solomon Kane sammmich. A monster gets a couple of lines about wanting to destroy the whole human race near the end, but by that point Solomon Kane has killed most of the other monsters, so that's a pretty optimistic goal. The story is mostly an extended siege of a tavern and a lot of fighting off the monsters as they try to get in. Not terrible, but nothing special.

(Aside: I like the way they did "The Rattle of Bones," but it felt rushed. It could have used a longer simmer to get the right spooky flavor.)

The dialogue isn't great, either. It's serviceable for the most part, with occasional awkward line: "Did your prayers stop that thing, priest? No! 'Twas this [the pistol], in my iron right hand!"

In the end, it's the gore that makes me pause. For a great story (and the first one is quite good), I can put up with even a lot of it. But the second story was pretty weak, and being constantly showered with visceral splatter makes me think I'm going to leave the rest of these volumes on the shelf.

(I should also mention that the coloring in the first volume was done by the excellent Dave Stewart, who also colored many of the Dark Horse Conans with art by Cary Nord. Give credit is credit is due, Stewart does a bang-up job.)