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Rogue Angel: Teller of Tall Tales #1
Posted 26 Mar 2008
Writer: Barbara Randall Kesel
Artist: Renae De Liz
Letters: Neil Uyetake
Colors: Ray Dillon
Publisher: IDW Publishing
1.00 out of 5 Stars
Reviewed by Adam McGovern
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A few years ago an indie comic company was promising a knockoff of
the Black Panther whose hook was that he was the last surviving
descendant of the legendary medieval Malian emperor, Sundiata. The
only problem was that Sundiata has a lot of surviving descendants,
including one of the most famous singers in the world, Salif Keita; a
good sign that, when building your fantasy around faulty premises,
it’s best to stick to un-disprovable bad science, not
immediately googlable made-up facts. Some comics, as anyone
who’s survived my year-end review column knows, I give up after
one issue; that one I dropped after the solicitation. Whereas Rogue
Angel I stuck with all the way to Page 11.
“When building your fantasy
around faulty premises, it’s best to stick to bad
science, not immediately googlable made-up facts.”
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This one, based on a successful series of pulp novels about an
archaeologist who wields the lost, sorcerous sword of Joan of Arc,
finds our heroine on a dig in the American West with a scholar in
multicultural studies along to check the prospect that Huckleberry
Finn was partially derived from a (fictional) African-American
academic whom Mark Twain met in a (nonexistent) Nevada saloon run by a
free black owner and frequented by a diverse clientele. Apparently
powerful interests are willing to send death-threats to see that this
racially-inclusive rewriting of America’s bibliographies and
library catalogs doesn’t happen (I guess every day can’t
be lost Holy Grails and secret Nazi cabals for your average
supernatural archaeologist).
The only problem is, Twain (though later much repentant) was still
a high-profile hate monger in a largely pro-slavery population at the
time this comic shows him rubbing elbows with a fairytale
family-of-man. The other only problem is it’s been 16
years since a real-life researcher turned up a newspaper column by
Twain that claimed to extensively quote a conversation with a black
youth which persuasively, if not conclusively, suggests that Huck
Finn’s dialogue and persona had an actual black source; not much
happened to erode the official authorship of this apparent new entry
to the annals of stolen black works by famous white names, but then
again, no one was murdered over it either. Reality can be
disappointing in all kinds of ways.
And a whole miniseries turning on a plot point you don’t even
have to go to google to discount makes your interest start to flag,
leaving only Rogue Angel’s droning West Wing-style
course-syllabus dialogue and, of course, lots of pathologically perky
manga-boobs in case women being archaeologists, literary scholars and
mythic warriors alone doesn’t do it for ya. I’m sending
this one back with an F.
—CCdC—
Cover image used without explicit permission in accordance with the "Fair Use" provision of US copyright law.
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