World of Warcraft #1- a review

Hey gang. I am not sure if I will be able to do the show on Sunday, so I wanted to share a review with you to tide you over for the holiday. Consider me a your first turkey of the weekend.

I am a major WoW (World of Warcraft) fan. Both my wife and I play the game and enjoy the friends we have made. When this book was first announced, I had my reservations. This is based on a MMORPG (if you don't know what that is, find someone between the age of 15 to 25 to tell you) so everyone experience is different. You could line up 50 people and none of them would have the same look, feel or drive to the game. So how would DC and Wildstorm try and convince people to read it?

Well, for starters, they got Walter Simonson to write it. If you are old enough to remember his run on THOR, then you know that he can handle mythology rather well. In this issue he does not disappoint. He begins to flesh out the characters right from the beginning and handles the mythology that Blizzard (the company behind WoW) has put into their characters with a nice deftness. He introduces us to a human character with no name and places him in the middle of Horde territory. His fighting skill is shown right away and while he has memory of who he is or how he got there, he is captured by Rehgar, the orc Shaman. He is put into a cage with Broll, a Night Elf druid; and Valeera, a Blood Elf rogue. They train for a competition to begin at Dire Maul so they must learn to work as a team, an issue since Night and Blood elves are mortal enemies. The human rallies the team against another composed of the Horde races of Undead, Tauren, and Troll. It is he who saves the others and establishes himself as the hero of the opening arc.

The artwork is handled by Ludo Lullabi. It is apparent to me that he is influenced by Humberto Ramos, as his style is very manga-esque. He gives the characters a sense of proportion in both height and stature that is in the game. I had a friend look over the book the other night and he loved the way the fight at the end of the book flowed with an energy and style to it. I agree, the battle in the training area is frenetic, the same as it would be if you were playing the game.

So, what do I think? Well, I think that I could hand this book to someone who is not a WoW fan, never played the game, and they might like it. If it was their sort of thing. Fans of Conan would probably dig it. On the negative side, I had my feelings sort of validated. Of the characters they introduced in this issue, 3 of them (the shaman, druid and rogue) have been made into the first wave of figures, coincidentally by DC direct. On second thought, it's not a coincidence at all. But I would give it a solid B for a first issue and of course I will stick with it. I would recommend it to anyone looking for something both mainstream and slightly off the beaten path.