Lucas Blogs About Head Lopper — Vol. 1

I mean, how could I not buy a comic called Head Lopper?

 So, what's this book's dea — Oh, this is that Head Lopper comic you mentioned two weeks ago.

It is that. Specifically it's Head Lopper & The Island or A Plague of Beasts. It was written, drawn, and lettered by Andrew MacLean with colors by Mike Spicer, Andrew MacLean, Lin Visel, and Joseph Bergin III.

How informative. Would you care to share anything else about it?

Sure, it's a kind of swords and sorcery adventure comic about a wandering warrior by the name of—

Let me guess: Head Lopper?

No, Norgal, but everyone calls him the Head Lopper on account of his penchant for lopping heads off.

Charming, so, just how much of a penchant for decapitation would you say that Norgal has?

His sidekick is Agatha the Blue Witch's head.

Fair enough.

It begins with Norgal, recently summoned to the island of Barra in order to slay the Sorcerer of the Black Bog, who has plagued the island with beasts!

Just like the title prophesied!

In any case, Norgal's end of the story is pretty simple, a lot of encounters with monsters with heads in need of lopping. But we don't just see things from Norgal's point of view. We also track the Sorcerer as he manipulates events from the Black Bog with the help of the king's steward—who wants to avenge his father's death at the hands of the old king. . . it's a whole thing. Anyway, there isn't actually a whole lot to say about the story of this comic, so let's just get started.

Okay, did you like it?

Yeah, I mean, it's kind of in the vein of Robert E. Howard's Conan stories but without the baggage of Howard's outdated takes on race and sexual politics.

Hmm, I'm not sure if you can just sever a genre like swords and sorcery from it's more problematic elements. Isn't that part of what Lovecraft Country was about?

Kind of, although Lovecraft Country is at least partly about confronting outdated racist tropes. I suppose you could say that Head Lopper ignores that history in favor of simply telling a story without those tropes. Although, now that I think of it, there is only a single black character in the story. But Zhannia and Norgal do team up to fight a monster and she is merely waylaid on a quest of her own. There's also an epilogue that resolves her storyline on the titular island. That said, I think there is room both for books that interrogate the harmful aspects of a genre and for books that try to excise them and focus on the genre's core appeal. For swords and sorcery I'd say that the core appeal is a combination of adventure, violence, magic, and moral ambiguity. And Head Lopper delivers on all those fronts.

That's setting the bar pretty low.

It is. But I do think MacLean manages to set Head Lopper apart from similar types of stories through the absurdity of things like, say, Norgal allowing a sea monster to swallow him in order to decapitate it from inside its esophagus. Or by having his sidekick be the head of someone who managed to survive her head being lopped off. There's also the art.

Well, that is pretty important in a comic book.

As should be obvious from the fact that I like it, MacLean's style is stylized. Norgal's shoulders are roughly as wide as a Mack truck, Agatha's chin and nose are elongated, and the big blue scorpion monster that Norgal and Zhannia are nearly sacrificed to has a goofy face image on its tail. The colors (by Mike Spicer in three issues and by MacLean in one) go back and forth between vibrant and atmospheric, aiding in the visual storytelling. This is the type of comic where big action scenes with little dialogue are the norm, and Maclean handles this deftly. The fights between Norgal and the various beasts on the island have excellent pacing and — as you might have guessed from the title — just a whole bunch of heads getting lopped off.

So, not appropriate for kids?

Definitely not. But not really anything deep or revelatory for grown-ups either. Just well-executed genre storytelling with enough humor and action to keep you entertained. Assuming that that's what you're into.

Head Lopper & The Island or A Plague of Beasts written and drawn by Andrew MacLean with colors by Mike Spicer, Image comics trade paperback edition, July 2017, 280 pages, pairs well with strong drink and battle weariness

Links:

Here's the artist's website, if you're into that kinda thing.