Sacrifice #2

Written by Sam Humphries
Art by Dalton Rose

There's a great deal to like about Sam Humphries and Dalton Rose's self-published, and self-distributed comics series Sacrifice, but a big one for me is that I don't know when a new issue is going to appear in my pull-file.  I just got the first issue last week, and suddenly the new one is here! 

Sacrifice is a very cool comic.  It's about a guy who has ended up back in the period of time right before the Spanish conquistadors made contact with the Aztecs.  It's a time of great sectarian violence, and a time of revolution, led by the female warrior Malintzin (known to the Spanish as Malinche). 

Hector, our point-of-view character and time traveler has found himself embroiled in the conflict between the followers of two gods, and is pressed upon to kill Malintzin before she can be sacrificed, for reasons that are somewhere between complicated and unclear.  There's a lot going on in this comic, and the pacing can feel a little off at times (especially at the end of the issue), but I really like what Humphries is doing with this.

There's an easy parallel between this comic and what Brian Wood is doing with Northlanders at the moment - both tell of societies at the cusp of great change (and that's before Cortes shows up; things are going to get a lot worse for the Aztec), and both tell their stories using plain speech.

Rose's art is great, and everything about this self-directed effort is professional and very interesting.  Given the inherent rarity of this comic, I feel lucky that I've been able to secure a copy, and that it looks like I'll be able to read it through to its completion.