Sticking with Image, Feather is a miniseries by Steve Uy.  Uy's last work for Marvel was Eden's Trail, which was shoved out with minimal publicity and bombed horribly before being editorially mutilated in the later issues.  Uy describes Feather as "what I consider to be my first real published comic book", which suggests that he's disowned Eden's Trail.  Going by his version of events, I can't really blame him.

Originally conceived as a graphic novel, Feather has been reworked and redrawn as a miniseries.  We're in what seems to be a sort of quasi-fantasy post-apocalypse world, where there are functioning remnants of twentieth century technology around but the most recent major historical events involved dragons.  However, the wars are far enough in the past that everybody seems to have settled down happily enough to the new status quo; the general tone is a light, pastoral world where the romantic subplots have a definite innocence to them.

Normally I find this sort of thing a bit cloying, and indeed there are a few moments that grate - notably a splash page of lead character Sehv looking contemplative, accompanied by musings in a horribly obvious font that end up making the page look like an inspirational calendar.  But Uy has a nice sense of comic timing, and simple but charming figures, combined with beautiful colouring, make the book surprisingly likeable.  Surprising to me, at least, considering that I don't even like the genre.

Kind of sweet, really.  Pleasantly unexpected.

Rating: A-

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