Titan Comics put out Solomon Kane: The Lion’s Errant #1 this week, the second solo outing from writer and artist Patrick Zircher after his prior series carried Robert E. Howard’s puritan wanderer from the Barbary Coast to the canals of Venice. This time Kane lands in India, a land split among rival powers, tracking a ring of slavers through a plot that has bigger things waiting in the wings.
The issue opens with Kane restless, hunting for a fight he can’t seem to find, a strange note for a character who has never lacked a mission. He calls himself “a crusader without a cause,” a play on the old rebel-without-a-cause line. The phrase lands oddly for a Puritan witchfinder. Puritans historically held a dim view of the Crusades and the Catholic tradition behind them, so hearing Kane reach for the word as a badge of honor reads like a slip in the character’s own voice rather than something he would say.
From there the story moves fast into the region’s politics. Local mistreatment shows up on the page and a mystery builds underneath it. The issue ends with a killing, carried out by a figure the reader hasn’t been given any reason to care about yet. Titan’s own credits page names that figure as some kind of vampire or ghost before the story itself gets around to revealing it, spoiling a beat the script hadn’t even played.
None of that derails the issue so much as it exposes the format problem underneath it. This reads like a script written for the trade rather than for single issues, a four-part story where issue one exists mostly to introduce the setting and introduce the players. There isn’t enough plot here to stand on its own the way a single-issue comic needs to.
The art is where the book earns its keep. Zircher handles both the pencils and the script here, same as he did on The Serpent Ring, and the linework and page layouts carry the issue when the story itself is still finding its footing. There isn’t a page in the issue that falls short on the art side.
Add it up and The Lion’s Errant #1 lands as a 7 out of 10: a competent opening chapter dragged down by a decompressed script and a spoiler baked into the credits, held up by art that doesn’t put a foot wrong. Titan and Zircher have three issues left to pull the India arc together, and the pieces (a warrior queen, an empire, a slaving ring, whatever is stalking Kane in the shadows) are all on the table now.
Readers who like their comics one issue at a time may want to sit this one out until the collected trade arrives, where the pacing of a single issue should smooth out across a full read. Does the rest of the arc earn the mystery it’s setting up, or is this another case of a story built for the wrong format?
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NEXT: Dynamite Just Lost Edgar Rice Burroughs Too, And Titan Comics Is Stepping Into The Gap
If the art is good enough then I can usually forgive the bad writing. Thanks for this review.