Sacrifice #4

Written by Sam Humphries
Art by Dalton Rose

I don't know when this book actually came out (Sam Humphries website said it was coming in January), but my favourite comic store, one of only two in the country that sell this book, only got their copy of issues four and five today.  I was going to read them both together and then write about, but I decided that a self-published and self-distributed book that is this good deserves to have as much written about it as possible.

Sacrifice has been following Hector, a depressed young man who has somehow found himself in Mexico City (then called Tenochtitlan) just prior to the arrival of the Spanish in the Americas. Hector has had a difficult experience in Moctezuma's empire, being seen by almost everyone as mystical and special, but not always accepted by the different religious sects that are jockeying for power.

As this issue opens, Hector is performing the sacrifice of a great warrior, during which he receives a vision of his own time.  He realizes that, if he is going to do anything to save the Aztecs from the fate brought to them by the Spanish, he has little time to influence Moctezuma into uniting with the city-states he has been ruling by fiat, and preparing to repel the Spanish invaders.  This plan doesn't sit well with one of his religious rivals, and Malin, the famous female rebel who sided with Cortes, manages to disappear to parts unknown.

I've always been attracted to the idea of revisiting the earliest instances of contacts between Europeans and the indigenous Americans, and like how Humphries has been using this series to somewhat balance the historical scales.  I look forward to reading the next issue, which is just a little ways deeper into this week's reading pile.