World of Dungeons and GuildQuest Online

The Guild #1

Backstory? Yes, backstory. “The Guild” is a comedy webseries focusing on a bunch of people who play a fantasy MMORPG, created by and starring Felicia Day, who got a lot of attention a year or two ago when she co-starred in “Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog.” Day plays Cyd Sherman, a very insecure woman whose alter ego in “The Game” is Codex, the healer for a dysfunctional online guild that calls itself the Knights of Good.

Well, Dark Horse Comics offered Day a shot at writing a miniseries based on her webseries. While the show focuses on Cyd after she’s been playing the game for a while, the first issue of the series functions more like an origin story for her. We meet her while she’s in therapy, playing in an orchestra, getting mostly ignored by her moronic boyfriend, obsessed with becoming a rock star. She tries out the game on a whim, desperate to find a way to re-invent herself as a happier, more successful person, and quickly grows to love the action and roleplaying of the game. Will she let the game take over from her real life?

Verdict: Thumbs up. I’ve never managed to get into the webseries, but the comic is pretty cute. I’m sure you’ll get a lot more out of it if you’re an avid fan of the series, but even if you’re not, it’s well-written, with a great eye for all the crazy background stuff in MMOs (No surprise — Day is a big fan of the “World of Warcraft” MMO), and the illustrations are great, too. Go pick it up.

X-23 #1

This one-shot spotlights one of Marvel’s weirder concepts — Laura Kinney, the angsty gender-switched clone of Wolverine. X-23 is visiting the Big Apple with Wolverine while they investigate a series of murders of former mutants, on behalf of Jubilation Lee, former X-Man and ex-mutant. That only lasts a few pages before Laura goes running off on her own to… I’m not really sure what. She somehow runs into a bunch of homeless mutants she used to run with in the “NYX” series. And there’s something with some kind of psychic entity that wants something from her.

Verdict: Thumbs down. I wanted to like this one, but it just didn’t make any real sense to me. But the art by Filipe Andrade and Nuno Alves is absolutely beautiful and unlike anything you’ll see in a mainstream comic.