REVIEW: God Summoner #1

Created / Written by Dionysis Zogaris | Artist: Manos Lagouvardos | Cover  Colorist: Daniel Rosa Duran 

Images of Gods, Guns, and Inquisitors. A Dark Fantasy Comic Book filled with mythological themes in  28 pages of high-quality artwork. God Summoner’ is a Dark Fantasy story that follows, Adelice  Belmont, a gifted girl with the powers of a Summoner, and her family’s connection to the parallel world of Zaros, a world ruled by a regime and is dependent on Gods. 

God Summoner Issue 1 is yet another interesting fantasy tale to hit the indie comics world. It’s a story of a cross-dimensional pursuit of power, with classic fantasy elements. 

STORY .5 – Star 

Zogaris does a good job to begin this story by presenting the reader with the fantasy elements they are looking for. Showcasing monolithic structures and knights in spectacular armor, galloping on horseback to the crux of the issue. The .5 rating is due to the fact that as a reader, I feel I only got the cr out of the crux. Issue 1s are always difficult for this reason. Especially for fantasy, because a creator is trying to balance the amount of information and action to give a reader to keep the glued in. Zogaris comes close, but I’m left guessing on a handful of plot points from the past and present. It’s important to leave a reader with questions as a reason to come back for more, but I could have used more information to understand the characters and the worlds they live in.  

ART .5 – Star 

The art of this book is very intriguing and it is why I chose to review it. It has received a .5 star rating for two reasons. The first being an opinion I have mentioned before in reviews and it is that “Anything  trippy should be in color.” Fantasy and sci-fi, I believe always benefit from color because they are truly stories of immersion. Fantastical stories, with fantastical characters. Colors are fantastical, as well as a  great way to draw a reader in and give them a reason to spend an extra minute looking at the page. This book has some excellent pages for color in my opinion. Don’t get me wrong, black and white art does have a place in fantasy. For instance, if one of the dimensions in this book was black and white while the other was in color, I would have loved that transition. 

My second reason for dropping the rating was, at times the art was inconsistent. Some pages have a ton of detail, while others seemed to have half of the detail that the previous page had. Perhaps with more detail I would not have felt as strongly about color.  

DIALOGUE .50 – Star 

The dialogue of a story is what tells a reader about its characters. Who they are, what they’ve been through, and should give the reader an idea about the types of decisions the characters will make as the story progresses. In issue 1, the characters don’t appear to be driving the story as much as they seem to be playing the roles for the story. We know the parts of the characters, but we will need issue 2 to tell us about the characters themselves.  

EDITING .1- Star 

I found no issues with grammar. 

MECHANICS  .75- Star 

The story seemed clunky at times. There were some parts of it where the action of a scene came off forced, for the desired outcome and it missed out on adding valuable background information.  

A narrator box or a character thought boxes could have been beneficial in explaining the story and its  characters. 

CLOSING STATEMENT 

God Summoner issue 1 gave me a sense that there is a lot more to come from Zogaris. With hints into this dark fantasy realm, I’m excited to see what elements of this world get presented next.