One Coin Reads 10: Kill The Minotaur, by Pasetto, Ketner, Cantamessa and Beaulieu

Kill The Minotaur, by Pasetto, Ketner, Cantamessa and Beaulieu

2018

<all spoiler review>

This ain't your daddy's ancient Greek myth! And that's the main reason I didn't enjoy this book.

Athens lost the war to Crete. Now, they pay tribute to King Minos by sacrificing their best citizens to his unearthly labyrinth. Conspirators believe Theseus can be the hero they need, who can end the mad king’'s bloody reign... but no one on this world has ever encountered anything like the savage minotaur.

-Amazon listing (bold emphasis by me)

Expectations can really affect the enjoyment of something, and in this case, it hurt my enjoyment of Kill the Minotaur. I barely bought this, because there were some signs this wouldn't be up my alley. The cover is a little bland, and I'm just a little tired of Image Comics. On the other side of things, I love ancient myth from any culture, and of course I love the Greek myths which have been mined in popular culture since before I was born. And it was only ¥464.

I spent a good part of 2020 COVID hibernation playing Assassin's Creed: Odyssey, which liberally uses myth in its storylines. I'm not some traditionalist desiring a textbook retelling. I realized this would be drawn in a mainstream comics style with overdone computer colors and maybe some flippant humor in the character portrayals. It's always hit or miss with me but I was willing to take a chance on that. My number one hope was some azure blue skies and water in portraying ancient Greece, as a contrast to the grunge of a lot of modern books.

The first issue has some nice scenes in Athens

So the minotaur is a space alien.  That should have been the title. Space Minotaur. If it was, I would have gone into this a lot differently, and considered it a sci-fi tale mixing in Ancient Greece, and would have liked it a little more. Most of the book is still Alien in the labyrinth, which isn't my thing, but it's a concept that will appeal to some audience. I was hoping to read a fun modern comic take on the tale of Theseus and the Minotaur, not some what if...? take on it.

The labyrinth absorbs the dead or something. It uses the concept, "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic," and doesn't have to explain anything

There are some positive things to say about this. The artist, Lukas Ketner, is decent. I know what's happening from scene to scene. One of his strong points is character design. He has a cast of eight or so characters in white tunics running around, and for the most part, you can tell them apart at a glance. In a comic like this, that's an essential skill. And he has fun rendering the labyrinth. In this, the labyrinth is a spaceship made of organic technology that grows and shifts, making it the maze of myth. It's pretty H.R. Giger influenced, but it's hard to escape Giger's influence when making organic technology.

The writing is credited to two people, Chris Pasetto and Christian Cantamessa, and it's competent, though unexceptional. The hook isn't as crazy as it's presented (I'll get back to this at the end). The arc of the book is decent throughout the six issues and is paced well. The characters, especially Theseus, aren't overly dramatized. They are written like people as opposed to legends. It's all fine, though not exciting.

This is my first time reading anything from Image's Skybound sub-imprint. All I know of it is that it's Robert Kirkman's imprint and that he helps out. So when you read the advertising blurb or look at what it revealed on the cover or even the title of the book or that its listed genre is fantasy and not sci-fi, I can't say if this was the authors' wish or something that was an outside influence. The thing is, the minotaur as space alien isn't a great twist. It could be a hook, but it's not a twist. Having ancient people interact with modern genres is a very fun hook, for example in the movie Stargate. This is an Image book, and there is almost nothing from the company that doesn't have sci-fi or supernatural elements in it, so when this twist appeared, I just sighed. All I wanted was a straight old Minotaur story. Instead I got a straight old Image book.