Solomon Kane: The Serpent Ring #2 - Titan Comics

SOLOMON KANE: THE SERPENT RING No. 2, May 2025

Despite its twenty-three page plot heavily relying upon a dubious alliance between Robert E. Howard’s “sombre-looking” creation and the murderous villain Rolando Zarza, Patrick Zircher’s storyline for Issue Two of “Solomon Kane: The Serpent Ring” surely must have delighted its audience when it hit the spinner racks in April 2025. Sure, many readers may well struggle to believe the Seventeenth-century Puritan would stomach the dishonourable knight’s company for a single night, let alone the fifty-three days it takes them to travel together to the Kingdom of Kongo. But having placed the unlikely pair alongside a Venetian scholar and his daughter, as well as the highly disagreeable Nico Cassani, the ultimate fate of this band of incongruous adventurers certainly proves an attention-grabbing prospect. 

In fact, the American author wastes absolutely no time in showing this comic’s audience just how ‘unstable’ the five travellers can be whilst drinking together, by penning them all brawling in a disreputable tavern on the Gold Coast. This brutal bout of pugilism goes a long way to illustrate that none of the sword-fencing fighters will tolerate even the slightest disrespect to their so-called honour, whilst also rather cleverly portraying young Diamanta with a surprisingly wild side of her own when the brown-haired researcher merrily batters a local harlot over the head with a drinking jug; “I trounced that trollop!”

Similarly as beguiling though is arguably the artist-turned-writer’s secondary thread concerning the ill-fated Father Goncallo and a truly-terrifying Priestess Of Set. The fanatical Sha-Kabet’s obsession with keeping her killer cult’s presence a secret quickly shows that even a man of god is not safe from a harrowing demise, and also promises plenty of treacherous intrigues in the near future when the dead Christian is cunningly replaced by a shape-shifting serpent man.

Zircher’s layouts are also extremely pleasing to the eye, with the aforementioned holy man’s shock at seeing his exact doppelgänger clearly testing his sanity, if not his devout faith. Furthermore, the illustrator does a great job in physically imbuing the likes of Zarza and Cassani with just the sort of dangerous, dynamic energy an onlooker might well expect of two unprincipled brigades who have few moral scruples with which to live by.

The regular cover art of "SOLOMON KANE: THE SERPENT RING" #2 by Ivan Gil