Making The Saving Throw: Pathfinder #7 Review

Dear Dynamite Comics: please reconsider the font you use to number issues. With God as my witness, I thought Pathfinder #7 was actually a #1. It’s the only reason I bought it.

Because normally I would never buy a sword and sorcery book, at least not sight unseen. I have a mental block when it comes to genre stories about quests and swords and paladins and magic users. You can give me a story about a hero in spandex attacking a giant monster, the same story with a hero with a laser pistol and a giant robot, and the same story with a dude with a sword and a dragon, and I will pick stories one and two almost every time. I’m the same when it comes to role playing games: Shadowrun and Call of Cthuhlu, yes; Dungeons & Dragons, no.

But I review comics, so I bought what I thought was a first issue, because frankly, I need to file copy almost every day, and hey: you never know. But while I was disappointed when I saw that it was actually a seventh issue, my spirits were lifted when I saw it was written by Jim Zub, the writer of Skullkickers, a sword-based adventure story that is a favorite outlier in my eyes due to the presence of a gun, and metric buttloads of solid humor.

Pathfinder #7, however, is no Skullkickers. It is a far more conventional D&D-style story, by which I mean it is very much like a game of Dungeons & Dragons. Zub gives us the well-balanced party of adventurers, cast as if by a demanding DM, with modern-style dialogue and some of the classic obstacles and antagonists of that game.

It is also a well-executed entry point for new readers, introducing a new adventure for the party, demonstrating internal conflict, and teasing one of the great battles one can find in a game of D&D.

You know, if you like that sort of thing.