Realm of the Claw

    (Image, 2002-2004)
™ and ©2002 Stan Winston Creatures Inc.

There’s a tendency for comics these days to be, not so much comics, as inexpensive movie proposals or marketing tools for merchandise “brands,” and it’s pretty clear from the get-go that Realm of the Claw has multimedia stars in its eyes.

But to judge it on purely on its merits as a comic book, it’s sort of Cat People with epic fantasy and Earth First overtones about a pair of diametrically opposed brothers (one’s a Green protester with a special relationship with animals; the other’s an exploitive sleaze) who appear fated to play out an ancient battle between a pair of cat-god brothers.

The art is, without question, absolutely beautiful, especially when depicting big cats, though it does have a vaguely European-looking shiny, superficial gloss. But its biggest drawback is that it just ends, with so minor a “conclusion” that I was flipping through the ads in the back, hoping I’d somehow missed a page.

— S.A. Bennett
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