Dark Agnes #2 - Marvel Comics

DARK AGNES No. 2, May 2020

Despite only being the one hundredth best-selling title of March 2020, following a fall in sales of approximately six and a half thousand copies, Becky Cloonan’s script for Issue Two of “Dark Agnes” must have still pleased the comic’s remaining 16,942 loyal readers. For whilst the book’s narrative spends a considerable amount of time focusing upon its titular character feasting and carousing with Etienne Villiers at the Chateau de Fontainebleau, it still provides a positively enthralling storyline packed full of deception, intrigue and murderous manoeuvres.

Indeed, in many ways, the American author’s twenty-page plot pans out like the opening to a thrill-a-minute detective novel, with Robert E. Howard’s creation very much playing the role of both investigator and ultimately stooge. Surrounded by treachery and just the sort of disconcertingly anonymous disguises one would expect to fill a huge residence hosting a masquerade, its desperately difficult to determine just who the swashbuckling heroine can trust, especially when earlier in the tale, the Pisa-born writer overtly lets slip that the distinctly deadly Sister Marie knows far more about the shady shenanigans taking place than her holy habit should allow.

Furthermore, Cloonan still manages to imbue this publication with moments of pulse-pounding pace, most notably when two clerks-turned-assassins unwisely attempt to waylay Helen de la Mere’s stagecoach armed only with a crossbow, blade and evidently not nearly enough men. Fearless as she is resolute, this action-packed sequence should have any perusing bibliophile cheering in delight, as Agnes de la Fère finally dispatches one of the villainous rogues from the Pewter Pot with a surprisingly risky sword-thrust through the chest from atop an out-of-control horse-drawn carriage; “The bounty was too sweet to pass up. And you tore a hole in my favourite doublet -- Zut --!”

Bringing some extra bounce to this comic’s well-animated ambush, as well as plenty of menace to the fancy dress ball, are Luca Pizzari and Andrea Broccardo’s competently-crafted, consistent-looking layouts. Atmospherically coloured by Jay David Ramos, it is hard to actually spot the difference in the two artist’s contributions to this book, presumably due to the Italian “Star Wars” illustrator simply providing the finishes to Pizzari’s mid-comic breakdowns.

The regular cover art of "DARK AGNES" No. 1 by Stephanie Hans