Cover to GEORGE R.R. MARTIN'S THE HEDGE KNIGHT #1.
© 2003 Image Comics

Mania Grade: A-
Authors: Ben Avery, Mike S. Miller, Mike Crowell
Publisher: Image/Roaring Studios
Price: $2.95

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GEORGE R.R. MARTIN'S THE HEDGE KNIGHT #1

Dunk's master, the hedge knight Ser Arlan, has died, leaving Dunk with two choices: either sell off his master's things and try to live off the proceeds, or become a hedge knight himself and try to achieve the glories that Ser Arlan tried to achieve. It's hardly a difficult choice. But when he's followed to the local tourney by a boy he met at the inn, he realizes the responsibilities of a hedge knight might entail more than simply winning at jousting.

George R.R. Martin is the writer responsible for singlehandedly getting me interested in fantasy. I'd had some dalliances with the writing of Mercedes Lackey in the past, but Tolkien never did it for me (all those damn songs completely put me off), nor did any of the other big mack daddies of the genre. But Martin's A SONG OF ICE AND FIRE series treated the genre in a very different manner. Sure, there were still swords, still knights, and still the occasional bout of sorcery, but Martin took a naturalistic approach that few had taken before. Lackey's trilogies, for instance, all generally end happily, sometimes in a very forced manner. There's no such forced happiness in Martin's books, and indeed the last two in his long fantasy saga have ended on incredibly unhappy notes. Paradoxically, that makes me happy.

So it was with great interest that I picked up the first issue of THE HEDGE KNIGHT, Ben Avery's adaptation of a short story from an anthology LEGENDS edited by Robert Silverberg. HEDGE KNIGHT is set on the same world as the ICE AND FIRE saga, Westeros, and as such it would have interested me no matter who adapted it. But Avery does an extraordinary job of capturing Martin's unique cadences and his unusual ability to use phrases like "on the morrow" without making them sound too terribly stilted and old-fashioned. Even more surprising, Avery also recreates Martin's device of using internal monologue to present exposition, a key feature of the ICE AND FIRE books. It's such a faithful rendering of Martin's voice, in fact, that were I to go back and find the original short story in LEGENDS, I'm sure I'd find nothing wanting in this adaptation. I was originally disappointed that Martin himself wasn't writing the comic - but not for long.

Miller and Crowell's artwork recreates Martin's world adequately, though if there's any flaw in the entire book, it's that the artwork is perhaps a bit too polished to truly represent the gritty realism that pervades Martin's prose. The characters are a bit too nice-looking, and the surroundings border on antiseptic. Other than that, it's a real pleasure to see the images that had lived so long in one's mind's eye being brought to the page, especially to finally see the colors and banners of all those many Houses (an admitted flaw in Martin's work - it's hard to keep all those names straight at times, but here Miller and Crowell provide us with the visual references that the novels themselves desperately need).

On top of all this, it's gearing up to be a sweet little story, besides - though knowing Martin's work, it's not likely to stay "sweet" for very long. If these folks can capture the horrors of Martin's world as well as its beauty, then the rest of this series should be a very interesting read, indeed.