My initial read was a little confusing. There were odd names, people dressed in furs and mecha all in one big bucket. It evened out for me when I made the connection to Norse mythology. If you aren’t familiar with it, the basic story is that people fight giants but they all die in the end. It’s very tragic. Usually the people are good and the giants bad but this is switched in Edenworld and the story is told from the giant’s perspective.

The Norns are the people at war with the giants, otherwise known as the Jotun. They dress in furry viking style and are armed with hand weapons that have high tech built in. In the first chapter, there seems to be a knife that is able to easily cut into one of the Jotun’s armor and even burns a bit. Mostly, I saw spears but they had all kinds of tech tricks to draw upon.

The Jotun are long lived giant mechs complete with their own high tech gizmos. They look to be at least twenty feet tall and they seem to be mostly machine. In true Viking style, the Jotun raid the Norns for their supplies, including much needed fine metal ores not available anywhere else. The Jotun have tried to avoid injuring the Norn and they’ve tried to sneak around to (more or less) keep the fragile peace.

The story starts off with a Jotun raid and continues with a rescue operation. We see both sides trying to pick up the pieces. The Norns hatch a daring sort of raid of their own and it mostly succeeds, putting the Jotun in a bad place. Then a new sinister threat to both the Norns and Jotun emerges and there is great personal cost to pay by the time you read up to the present.

The art is top notch with great character (and creature) design. It looks like pencil with photoshop tones all used to good effect. In particular, the tones are used to direct your eye toward and highlight the most important part of each panel. The viewing angles and layouts have nice variety. An interesting choice was having very thin gutters.

I also dug the little details and well drawn bits even though some of the lines can be faint or carry a slight sketch look to them. The city downshots really have the sci-fi vibe and the pencils carry just the right amount of detail. Here’s an example of not too much detail. It took me a second to figure out what the object is and it adds something very meaningful to the story. You’ll need to read the story to fully grasp the significance, sorry.

While the action scenes during the spring 2008 run were hard to follow and some of the word balloon placements were a little distracting, I would still have given Edenworld five stars. However, it was difficult to understand what was going on in the comic (in general) without reading every scrap of information on the website and it had the occasional curse word. Aside from these nitpicks, I give Edenworld four stars.Rating:

Edenworld Saga
http://www.edenworldsaga.com
art and story by Chris Crontiris
edited by Jason Lanum
review by Delos
(4 votes, average: 5 out of 5)

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Note: Being that this is my last review for Comic Fencing, I just wanted to say thanks for reading.