Comic Review: Assassin’s Creed #2

Comic Review: Assassin’s Creed #2

November 29, 2015 1 By EVA

With the first issues behind us, I was looking forward to a more straight ahead, action oriented comic, free from the restraints of feeling the need to explain ever step with long winded and over descriptive dialogue. Alas, that weak part of this comic series returned and left me wondering how many people are now skipping through pages in order to get to the good parts of the story.

In the first issue we saw things for the most part in modern day, taking a bird’s eye view of things through the character of Charlotte. While issue #2 spends a majority of the time with Charlotte de la Cruz again, this time in the memory of an ancestor who is in fact a male assassin, the setting completely changes to that of Salem in 1692, where we find the male assassin in question Tom Stoddard in search of a Piece of Eden.4901603-ac_#2_cover_a_dennis_calero

The story set up is a lot of fun and something you would expect in the life of anexcellent assassin. Efficient, straightforward and very skilled, he moves from place to place, person to person, methodically searching for the Piece of Eden and not letting anything stand in his way. However, circumstances force him to team up with a woman and which eventually leads them both to very strange discovery.

As with the first issue, this comic is well paced and writers Conor McCreery and Anthony Del Col move the story along with plenty of action and intrigue to help them from page to page. The characters and plot threads are interesting and keep the reader focused as the story progresses.

However, the need yet again to constantly explain everything all the time is not as forgiving this time around. I understood the reasons behind it in the first issue but it’s time to leave the explanations behind and just let the reader figure things out on his/her own. I found it really distracting to the point of wanting to skip past some pages altogether.

I found Neil Edwards art to match and even surpass that of the first issue. Action scenes looking frighteningly real while at the same time the landscape was given the same attention to detail as the brutal fights and splattering of blood that happened on many occasions. Some of the faces of the characters could have been a bit more defined but overall the comic looked quite good.

As far as second issues go, this one served its purpose quite well. The story progressed and the art kept pace with great looking action and easy to view panels. Now, if they only clean up the dialogue a bit this could turn into a really good comic series.

Three and a half stars out of five