A Sword & Planet Graphic Novel: Bigfoot: Sword of the Earthman by Josh S. Henaman, Andy Taylor, and Tamra Bonvillain
Dipping back into the Sword & Planet genre for the day, here’s one of the odder items I have. Bigfoot: Sword of the Earthman, subtitled as “The Galaxy’s Greatest Action-Adventure Hero.” As far as I can tell, Josh Henaman is the writer, with Andy Taylor (Penciller), Tamra Bonvillain (Colorist), and Adam Wollet (Letterer).
This is a graphic novel collecting the first six issues of the story. I bought this because it was billed as sword & planet set on Mars, and featuring Bigfoot. It mostly was, although not quite what I was hoping it might be.
I gave it 3 1/2 stars, although at current I don’t have plans to buy the later material in the series.
The idea was quite good, if — of course — pretty far out there. Bigfoot somehow gets transported to an ancient Mars and becomes a hero. The art was good as well, although I’m not completely familiar with the comic reading process so I couldn’t always tell what was going on from the art. Maybe readers more familiar with the art form could.
The story has a tremendous amount of narration from the point of view of a Martian character who follows Bigfoot through the tale and relates the events, but he’s pretty clearly an unreliable narrator, which makes it difficult to know what is really happening. Bigfoot doesn’t talk at all, which was fine for a while but began to get a little old as the tale continued.
The book is called Sword of the Earthman, that being Bigfoot, but there’s very little sword slinging action through most of the book. Only in the last chapter do we really see Bigfoot cut lose and there is a lot of action. I was prepared to go with 3 stars until that ending chapter, which had much less narration and much more action, and some pretty good emotional moments as well as a surprise ending. If more of the book had been like that last chapter I’d have ranked it higher.
Charles Gramlich administers The Swords & Planet League group on Facebook, where this post first appeared. His last article for us was a a review of the 1994 horror anthology Young Blood. See all of his recent posts for Black Gate here.