In a predicament reminiscent of Anthony Quin’s role in Guns for San Sebastion, an orphaned fugitive takes up the burden of an expired holy man in a beleaguered place. However, in this gritty exploration of that interloper theme, Fallon and his team have crafted a setting that is somewhere between Tolkien’s Middle Earth, the mythic youth movie Neverending Story and the monotheistic psychopathy of Increase Mather’s historic New England. With all that the setting is clearly an alternative English history, an elvish Robinhood.

For those, like me, who hate elves, even though they are the good guys in this story, they get slaughtered in gruesomely illustrated fashion, much to my graphic pleasure. The most authentic aspect of Plague is the backdrop of the Black Death and the deep Christian antipathy toward unsubdued forestlands. The medieval motifs remind me of the heavy-booted warrior typology of the Warhammer Fantasy Role Playing Setting, which offers a perfect juxtaposition to the faerie realm.

In terms of connecting with the postmodern readership this reviewer is of the opinion that Fallon has hit on and excellent vehicle, one that is as old as literature—as ancient as Gilgamesh and Enkidu—and also relevant to the dystopian now, where society has come between the youth and their ancestry in a severing way. Both of the protagonists who emerge from the first issue have suffered the recent death of family and stand as alienated persons in the shadow of a violent edifice, with the fact that they are together lending even more peril to their predicament.

Fallon has constructed a setting and a narrative with the aid of powerful artistic allies, his Fey concept more highly developed and tinged with animism than I have read in literature aimed at a popular audience. Not being a devotee of the graphic comic form, in order for my enjoyment, the author has to delve into true character development, and, considering my age, my jading and my nonfiction background, I have found it most useful to follow a new author’s character development based on that figure so tarnished and caricaturized in popular media, the villain. Toward this end, Warbishop Monay, who is ultra-masculine and could have easily been written as a Bluto-like thug, is sympathetically portrayed without rendering him impotently conflicted. He is a Fey hunter through-and-through, revealed as an apex predator of an elemental kind, like a King Kull or Solomon Kane, even as he is revealed as holding sentiments for the boy-monk who he would be right, according to his brutal contract with God, to kill, but instead offers a fatherly gesture.

This last aspect, the realistic understanding that post-apocalyptic situations [the Black Death was the closest thing humanity has experienced to a Science-Fiction bio-apocalypse] are as likely to bring out humane overtures as practical predation, marks Plague as a higher order concept work.

If you favor the comic book form and are sick of superhero schlock, checkout Plague by Dennis McGee Fallon.

Literary Impressions of the Prose and Verse of Robert E. Howard