‘When Her Village Burned’ is a key issue, with a critical confrontation between Dag and one of the men that killed his family and a surprising revelation about Elsbeth. This review contains spoilers.
Sword Daughter #3
Written by Brian Wood
Art by Mack Chater
Colored by José Villarrubia
Lettered by Nate Piekos of BlambotFor ten years Dag slept, hiding from the horror that ripped his family apart. At the rocky outpost of Raven’s Fate, he comes face to face with the first of the Forty Swords, and the extent of his failure as a father.
Dag and Elsbeth arrive at Orkney. Chater treats us to a full page spread of the desolate cliffs of Hoy, the second largest of the Orkney islands. The island is recognizable by an anachronistic rendering of the “Old Man of Hoy,” a sandstone formation that sits on the western coast of the island.
Elsbeth heads to Raven’s Fate and arranges a meeting between her father and the unnamed first of the Forty Swords. The latter is an intimidating villain, an example of “Sword Daughter’s” less-is-more ethic; taunts and white-on-black speech balloons define his character, and they work.
The men meet in a grueling battle that spans close to half of the issue. At first, the villain tries to intimidate Dag with talk of what happened to his last challenger, but Dag snaps back with an acid “Why do you Danes have to talk so much before a fight?”
Dag and the mysterious bandit leader hack and slash with broadswords as Elsbeth, and the leader’s masked men look on. The arena is a hedge site that is covered in brown grass and delineated with a ritual stone circle. Chater pulls us in with large panels of the men bracing for big swings and then pushes us back with small panels that render overhead views of the vast arena and reminding us of the barren landscape that surrounds them.
There’s not much banter during the early stage of the duel until Dag gets a good shot in and the leader falls back on taunts to gain the upper hand. He’s a talker, getting into Elsbeth’s head in just a few panels at the start of the book, and then into Dag’s on his second try.
“Sword Daughter” is always efficient; we learn about the villain in media res, not via exposition. Rather than meet the bad guy, see how cool he is, and then fight him, we meet him during the fight. This comic is the antidote for compressed storytelling that needs a six-issue miniseries to tell about a-day-in-the-life of a superhero.
It looks like Dag will lose the duel, but he pulls out another ugly win at the last second, similar to the previous issue but in a much more gruesome fashion.
The villain is the first of the 40 Swords, so seeing him fall isn’t much of a surprise. ‘When Her Village Burned’ has a more significant plot turn for us.
Elsbeth has been narrating her saga in the past tense. In issue #2 we learned it was from a convent.
In this issue, we learn that the convent is somewhere on the Dnieper River in what is now Russia. She’s telling us her story 12 years after she started her journey with Dag, and they were separated at some point.
Elsbeth was held prisoner there, and she escapes in a scene that is presented in parallel with Dag’s battle.
Elsbeth says the nuns are “twisted women, as pious as serpents,” and we see that at 24-years-old she is no less savage than she was at 12, as she slaughters them and their guards.
As she leaves the convent, she tells us “My name is Elsbeth Dagsdottir. This is who I am and how I came to be,” echoing what she said in “Sword Daughter’s” opening issue. She starts another journey, to find her father.
Hopefully, we’ll see more of the skillful parallel story-telling we saw in this issue.
More than a quarter of the pages in ‘When Her Village Burned’ are wordless. Several others have one or two balloons in a single panel. Only the pages with the chatterbox first of the Forty Swords have a significant amount of dialogue, and this contrast is part of what establishes his character.
Continued belowChater is called on to do a lot of the heavy lifting in advancing the action, and he is more than up to the task. The fights are powerful and distinct. Dag and the bandit leader fight with savage slashes and violent hacks while Elsbeth dances between nuns and armored guards.
Villarrubia gives the convent a blue tint. The stone walls are a drab blue that the nuns and guards almost fade into, making them a part of Elsbeth’s prison. Her brown robes and red-tipped sword stand out against the blue. Elsbeth doesn’t belong there.
Orkney has earth-tones, a dry brown with touches of green, but the 40 Swords leader has a brighter tunic than anyone else on the island. The first of the Forty Swords stands out.
Being the letterer for a book like “Sword Daughter” must be a bit of thankless job at times. As I outlined above, the dialogue is often sparse, but in this issue, Piekos has a chance to flash some leather with the villain’s stylized speech balloons and the letter-heavy pages during the battle.
Final Verdict: 8.3 – ‘When Her Village Burned’ is the product of a team that is firing together on all cylinders.
