Cardini, William (aka Mark Hensel) – Shaman Thunder

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Shaman Thunder (with Josh Burggraf)

You know what I’ve always hated about any sort of wizard on wizard battle in the movies?  Or shamans, or any sort of people who were supposed to have all sorts of bizarre and unknowable mystical powers?  How stupid it always ends up being.  More often than not it turns into a typical physical slugfest, either due to a lack of imagination or a lack of budget, and it always drags me out of whatever willing suspension of disbelief I was going through.  Yes, in case you were wondering, there is a a point to all this: those two floating heads you see on the cover belong to two shaman, and their battle in this issue is exactly like this sort of thing should be.  Meaning that it only has the barest appearance of a conventional fight to us normal folk, but there’s clearly all sorts of things going on beneath the surface.  This issue starts off simply enough, as one shaman returns home and discovers that his thunder-root is missing.  He tracks down the thief (using magic, of course), but this leads him to believe another shaman (a disillusioned shaman who’s standing near the actual thief) is the thief, which leads to an absolutely awesome battle.  Go ahead, embiggen that sample below.  If you’re not impressed with that you’ve clearly never spent even a second of your life imagining what an actual shaman fight would look like.  The rest of the issue deals with the two shamans teaming up to fight the actual thief, but shamans never get along for long.  As for the art, William/Mark and Josh mostly draw alternating pages, and it’s seamless.  Sometimes it’s tough to say who would enjoy a particular mini and who wouldn’t, but this one is easy.  If you’re enough of a dork to want to see a thoroughly ridiculous though oddly realistic fight between two shamans, it’s never been done better to my knowledge.  If you consider yourself above such things, lucky for you there are many other mini comics in the world for you to choose from.  No price again, so I’m going with $2.50.