It is 901 AD. The Dark Ages. The darkest of times. Centuries after the Romans retreated and faded, yet many centuries before reason and order would take hold. The Dark Ages were times marked by sweat and blood and lives cut short by famine and disease. Desperate days. These were the times the lands known today as Great Britain were fought over like raw meat in a dog’s teeth. The world was up for grabs. New religions were sweeping the continent like a plague of hope in a hopeless time. These are the days that a Hellspawn named Covenant walked the earth in search of the truth, understanding and solution to the curse that bound him. These are his Dark Ages. These are his adventures…
Written by Steve Niles
Penciled by Nat Jones
Inked by Chance Wolf (#15),Jonathan Glapion(#16), Kevin Conrad (#17-19)
Colored by Mark Nicholas(#15-17), Jay Fotos(#18-19)
Lettered by Richard Starkings
For this addition of our binge through “The Dark Ages,” we will be looking at issues #15-19 as the main creative team of writer Steve Niles and penciler Nat Jones come aboard. When I had started this I had forgotten Niles was the main writer for the back half of the series. His resume generally leans into the urban side of horror, with works like “30 Days of Night” and “Criminal Macabre,” not the low-fantasy horror that “Dark Ages” is steeped in. His work on another later McFarlane Production, “Hellspawn” has a more obvious connection to his overall body of work. Nat Jones has done a lot of work with horror related properties in comics, film, and television. The creative duo bring a lot of horror credits, but their work in these first 5 issues does not feel very horrifying. While ‘A Child’s Crusade’ veered a bit too far into the experimental territory their book still had a coherent visual presentation. These first five issues act largely as soft reboot or reset of “Dark Ages” and transform it into a fairly standard looking comic.
This batch of issues for “Dark Ages” is a fairly soft rebooting or resetting of the series. The new creative team lean into the ability to time skip and transport us to a Lord Covenant that seems very familiar to the one at the start of the series. He has done something he had wanted to do from the start, claim his rightful place as ruler of the Rhyll, and be a man again. All of that taking over business is dispensed within a single page, the third one of issue #15, with a large block of semi-poetic narration and a set of vertical panels that dissect and objectify the form Black Knight. This page is the one that feels the most in keeping with the work of the previous page. But as the narrator foreshadows, happiness cannot last, and this interesting status quo is soon ripped out from under the reader for the overall status quo of “Dark Ages,” Covenant wandering Medieval Europe embittered, alone, and unable to escape his own violent tendencies.
Rebooting and resetting is now common practice in Big Two superhero books. The main “Spawn” title has done that several times throughout the series 300+ issue run, most notably during the ‘Armageddon’ arc and ‘Resurrection’ arcs. There is something that feels different about “Dark Ages,” perhaps it is due to the finality of this binge. We know it ends with issue #28. “Spawn” on the other hand is still ongoing reinventing itself (at least artistically) every couple of years and has the overall feel of a long running manga. “One Piece,” “Naruto,” and “Dragon Ball” have clear arcs but also center around recurring structures like tournaments. “Dark Ages” lacks that sort of unifying structure that it can always go back to and play the hits as it where.
The original “Dragon Ball” always had the World Martial Arts, but the fact it kept coming back gave the readers hope that Goku would finally win the darn thing. These five issues of “Dark Ages” lack that sort of growth, instead it strips Covenant back down on the same, somewhat, aimless quest and stagnation that has been plaguing him this entire run. Perhaps if we had gotten to see the Covenant as a ruler for longer than 8 pages his apparent cursed nature and the subsequent massacre would land with greater tragic impact. With “Dark Ages” being published well into the main “Spawn” series run I have been considering it often with a lens of metafiction. Considering it through that lens seems to highlight the overall poor character work of Covenant at the center of the series. It heightens Covenant’s lack of growth or awareness as a character when he meets with Cogliostro. As a reboot-reset, Cogliostro is allowed to be around again despite apparently sailing off to the New World or the North in the previous issue, and with no real ill will between Covenant and him. Cogliostro chides Covenant for their lack for vision in the grand game between Heaven and Hell that is being played and Cogliostro’s attempts to exit it. It is the kind of barb that rightly stings as a reader of the “Spawn” series and exposes the weakness of Covenant as a character as he fails to alter his fate. Despite having a certain amount of dramatic irony to it on the part of the reader, this irony fails to transform Covenant into a truly tragic character, instead it renders him a simple brute.
Continued belowIt wouldn’t be a resetting if there wasn’t some attempt at lowering the characters power level, which they do by a druid sect stripping Covenant of his Necroplasm. This movie is a bit obvious, but Niles does make good use of it with Covenant’s talk with the dying druidess who speaks of Covenant now having a freedom and agency even if he is to dumb to listen and understand. While the resetting in this batch of issues largely failed to grab me dramatically the creative team do have moments that give me hope it will play out better over the next eight issues.
Perhaps the biggest change for the book overall is the departure of Liam Sharp from art duties. Sharp provided a consistent and varied look for the series. Nat Jones and their cadre of inkers keep a largely consistent style across these five issue, it just isn’t as fun to look at in terms of page design. These comics read more like a traditional comic, sticking to five to six panel pages, and lack the interesting page design that helped to elevate and make the book standout. The inking of Jones is pencils clearly places the book in the vein of excessive 90s titles like “Spawn,” only without the excess. The closest moment of this sort of excess is a vertical pinup from issue #17, but that is only one image in a sea of them.
The biggest change Jones makes to the book is stripping away Covenant’s old costume, which largely works. He is no longer the Black Knight and so he dispenses with his armor and freighting grinned helmet. Stripping him of his armor makes for a good visual representation of the impracticality of Covenant as King is, as Cagliostro said it would be. He is no longer a man, he is undead. A zombie ruling the living. By the end of the run of issues, stripped of his necroplasm he is something else entirely bleeding red but apparently no longer Hellspawn nor man. Jones draws this version of Covenant with a cartoonish zeal, fully leaning into the monstrous nature of the characters design. If thers is one shortcoming it is how often the character appears to be a cousin to Dale Keown’s Pitt, a hulking gray mass with pupiless eyes and well defined cheeks. As cartoony and hulking as this design is, Jones and the inkers do manage to turn Covenant into a more emotive character that earn some moments of loneliness and despair when the story calls for it. Emphasizing the characters mass also allows for several excellent silhouettes to be made that also help to make Covenant a pitiful character.
The new creative team for “Dark Ages” do a lot in these first five issues. It isn’t entirely effective, but it clearly sets the book up for its final eight issues. What Steve Niles and Nat Jones do serves as an interesting example to compare how superhero books are presently and consistently reset and rebooted to that eternal status quo and how to navigate those waters in an attempt to make something dramatically effective.
