Dark Souls/Bloodborne Graphic Novels Review: The Fire Fades, The Nightmare Writhes

Alright, you got me. I wracked my brain trying to figure out a good snappy headline, and I kept returning to a pun involving kindling – because kinding bonfires, and Kindle e-readers – but I didn’t feel it sent the right message using ‘kindling’ in the title of a book review, especially since the books I’m about to discuss are pretty good.

The writers at Titan Comics must have faced an interesting challenge when the time came to provide graphic novels set in the Dark Souls universe.

After all, Dark Souls is not what we call a ‘conventional’ narrative. Series director Hidetaka Miyazaki explains that growing up poor, he used to read English-language books from the library for entertainment, only knowing some of the words, getting some of the plot but filling in the gaps with his own imagination. That ethos guides the Souls games, where there is certainly a lush world to take in and explore, but there are a number of gaps throughout, things that are left for us to speculate about or draw conclusions on our own.

You can imagine the head-scratching that might have occurred by a staff tasked with transposing this form of narrative style into a line of graphic novels. The Soulsborne games (sans Sekiro, which follows a more conventional narrative structure) are in a way an endpoint of player-driven storytelling, where how much or how little narrative you receive is curated entirely by the player’s willingness to deep-dive the lore of item descriptions and extrapolate lore through character, enemy and boss placement. In any static form of narrative, the experience is necessarily going to have to be curated by the writer, which means a conscious decision about what to say and what to not say.

And the first pages that were released to the public were met with…let’s be kind and call it ‘mixed reactions’. There was this one page from The Breath Of Andolus, and I seem to recall this page being the main source of fans’ derision. I’ll let you view it here.

If you’re not familiar with the series, I’ll bet that looks fine: the colours are vivid, the scene is stark and vibrant. But fans immediately jumped on the hear-me-reee train for a very specific reason: Solaire is made out to be a freaking badass. Just look at him. He looks like he’s about to fight something five times his size and then casually walk away from it as it explodes.

And fans were quick to point out that that’s…not really Solaire as we know him from the game. Solaire is meant to be, well, a dork. A lovable dork. He’s an overly optimistic loon obsessed with that ‘gloriously incandescent’ sun, a spark of light in what to that point is a bleak, unforgiving world. That’s why fans love him, and that’s why fans immediately assumed that the graphic novels would be some soulless cash-in by a company that saw the games were popular, without really understanding the minutiae of why people liked various aspects of them.

Well…guys, I hate to rain on the outrage-train (spoiler: I really, really don’t hate raining on it), but it’s a vision sequence, not real. Well, okay, it’s inferred to be based on a Solaire that the protagonist recognizes. But as we’ll discuss, Andolus takes place in a different cycle entirely than the one that saw the Chosen Undead ring the Bells of Awakening, gather the Lord Souls and supplant or depose Gwyn as the Lord of Cinder, so it could be a different Solaire entirely from what we’re familiar with. I say ‘could’, because in the games, a lot of the characters who appear from cycle to cycle tend to behave similarly to their predecessors. But there’s enough wiggle room there for me to give this scene a pass. If the whole book was about some version of Solaire who bears more in common with the Doom Slayer, rather than this being just a couple pages, I’d probably have a different take. And I’d also read the shit out of that, character inconsistencies aside, because come on.

It might look like I’m bending over backwards to avoid excoriating this scene or something, but if you’ve spent enough time reading my articles, you already know you’ll never get me to apologize for liking liking things more than liking complaining about things.

With that out of the way, I’ll be looking at five books for your consideration: The Breath Of Andolus, Winter’s Spite and The Age Of Fire from the Dark Souls line, and The Death Of Sleep and A Song Of Crows from the Bloodborne line. Why? Simply because those are the ones that I own as of this writing.

As far as broad-strokes musings, Andolus opts to have characters present their dialogue in what I’ll call ‘pygmy Shakespearean’: prithee, doth mother know thou butcher’th her dictionary? That sort of thing. It’s a mixed bag when they try to do this. The average character in the Souls games doesn’t actually talk like this for the most part, unless they’re someone particularly ancient.

Winter’s Spite just has the characters talking ‘normally’, while The Age Of Fire has some characters talk ‘fancy’ and some talk normally. I think TAoF is the one that nails it: lower-born characters talk more casually, while characters like Gwyn speak more formally, which is accurate to the world that’s presented in the games.

The Breath Of Andolus, written by George Mann and illustrated by Alan Quah, presents us the journey of Fira, an Undead struggling to hold on to her memories as she seeks to save the embers of the world’s dying flame, seeking to reconstitute the body of the ancient dragon Andolus, so that his everflame may once again light the world.

Her companion is a squirrely, underhanded scryer swiftly identified as…Aldritch!

There is a bit of Soulsian storytelling implication in the Andolus narrative, by the very fact that one of the main characters is Aldritch, and he’s human at this point. It stands to reason that those of us who go out of our way to read this fare will be familiar with mainline Dark Souls lore: at the end of time, the Lords of Cinder, those in past cycles who linked the fire in their respective Age, are called upon to relink the fire one final time. Unwilling to bear the agony of linking the fire again, the Lords abandon their thrones, leaving the burden to fall upon the player character, an Ashen One, construed of the ash of failed would-be champions from previous cycles, to link the flame.

Aldritch is one of those former Lords of Cinder, a Champion of a past Age.

So there is a certain sense of unspoken predestiny to The Breath Of Andolus: we know immediately that this book takes place in a different cycle from any of the games, Aldritch’s cycle to be precise. We know that Aldritch will eventually be the one to link the fire in his cycle, and what’s more, that he will descend so far beyond and beneath humanity that by the time we meet him in Dark Souls 3, he is no longer identifiable as ever having been human, being instead a wormy, sludgy mass that attacks you using Gwyndolyn’s puppeteered corpse.

None of this is leaned on too hard in the actual book; it’s inferred that we know all this already, and thus we know Aldritch’s destiny, to lose his humanity, to link the fire and ultimately be struck down by the conglomerated ash.

Andolus does a fine job of translating other aspects of the Souls formula: the bleak landscapes of a dying world, the sense that we have some of the picture but not all of it, and the intimidating foes who would most definitely have a health-bar at the bottom of the screen if they were in a game.

Those big beasties are rendered in lovely detail, and the artist’s chosen angles lend their attacks an effective weight, even on the page. And that’s important. It just wouldn’t be Souls without the oppressive weight of combat.

Quah’s art on Andolus is superb and appealing on the whole, its strongest point being the vivid colour contrasts, from furnacelike fires cutting the gloom of the fading world, to moonlight creeping into dingy dungeons and gorgeous crystal caves.

Winter’s Spite, retaining the Mann and Quah team-up, is good. Don’t get me wrong. If you live, breathe, eat and sleep all things Soulsborne, go ahead and get this book. But temper your expectations as to what you’ll find in here: it is a completely original story, with no recognizable faces or locations. Instead, it takes place in another snowswept painted world of sorts, called Winterspite.

The story, on its own, is solid enough. A traveling warrior within Winterspite, captured by hollows and made to fight other Undead for the entertainment of their demented host, escapes and finds his way to Ambervale, under the dubious courtesies of its Duke. To put it mildly, Ambervale is a creepy, creepy town and let’s not stop here.

The denizens of Ambervale have all gone physically hollow, yet retain enough muscle memory from their lives to keep going about their day, cheering the Duke’s return, attending a high-society ball in an extremely unsettling two-page spread, living as though they’re alive.

As it’s the same writer-artist duo from Andolus, all the same praise I have from the last volume applies here as well: the thick weight of sword combat with big beasties, the level of detail – though the colour contrast that Quah excels at is not to be found here in as much plentitude, because most of this book is swathed in cold, icy blue and white hues, with only the occasional flickering flame to sear the chill. And that certainly has its own merits: reading Winter’s Spite, it’s hard not to feel the chill for yourself.

In fact, the only complaint I really have about Winter’s Spite is more of a personal bugbear than anything else – it’s when a story like this takes place in a series with such rich lore and then doesn’t use any of it. I’ve previously talked about how it can hurt the long-term impact of stories that discard their surrounding continuity, but it shouldn’t be an inherently bad thing on its own. It just leaves Winter’s Spite having less impact on me as a Souls fan than the other books in the line.

Of all the books I’m discussing today, The Age Of Fire, written by Ryan O’Sullivan and illustrated by Anton Kokarev, is the one that I would really call essential for Souls fans. Rather than taking place in a different cycle like Andolus or with no recognizable characters like Spite, The Age Of Fire brings us the story of Arkon, one of Gwyn’s silver knights who fought with him in the war against the Dragons. Arkon, who has been raised by Gwyn for his deeds on the battlefield. And so he lives with his shame, for it was not he who slew a mighty dragon that day, a kill that Gwyn attributed to him: no, it was mighty and noble Artorias, who in doing so saved Arkon’s life.

Minor spoilers, as though everything lit by Gwyn’s Fire were not doomed from the first sparks eventually: in his journey, as he bids farewell to Artorias, bears witness to the spreading Undead curse and journeys into demon-overrun Izalith, Arkon becomes the first Black Knight, and ultimately, becomes the thing he once fought.

The story is compelling, showing us the life of a bit player in the makings of Gwyn’s ‘first sin’. The narrative weaves us through satisfying encounters with some very recognizable faces: a bittersweet reunion with Artorias as he moves to confront the darkness haunting Oolacile, the doings of the reclusive dragon-Duke Seath in the concentrated process of not giving even a third of a shit, Ornstein slaying his way through hollow hordes and more.

Arkon, haunted by the lie that defined his rise to acclaim, moves among these giants of men, ill-fitted and unsteady. These characters don’t feel shoehorned in for fanservice purposes, because this book is about this era. It would feel remiss to not have them.

I also believe The Age Of Fire has the best art on display here. I’ve previously broken down my favourite styles of graphic-novel art, and Kokarev’s damn-near-lifelike pencils and ominous effect-details present us with the lush, gloomy, depth-laden vistas of Gwyn’s Age of Fire.

Its backgrounds are swathed in haze and fog, and if I was to be super-critical in a way I don’t really enjoy or find value in being, I might say that they could have used more detail instead, but I’d prefer not to go that route. Instead, I quite like it: it’s atmospheric, but doesn’t go so far as to become an outright avant-garde abstraction like some pages of a book like Dead Space: Liberation. The hazy backgrounds against the clarity of the foregrounds make it feel like this is a story out of apocrypha and legend, where the mists of time threaten always to swallow up the tales of another era.

There’s such great colour in these atmospheres as well: the chaos-flames of Izalith blaze vividly off the page, while while the rain-sodden gloom of Oolacile is enough to make you imagine the petrichor in the air and a puddle forming beneath your book.

Bearing in mind that I have yet to read every Dark Souls graphic novel, The Age Of Fire comes up top of the class so far.

On the Bloodborne side, The Death Of Sleep, written by Ales Kot and illustrated by Piotr Kowalski, tackles the game’s reality-bending narrative head-on, delving into the psychology of a hunter re-living the Hunt again and again. The game doesn’t really afford us a chance to explore this: silent protagonist and all, when we play the game, we take in the unique layers-of-dreams reality in which Yharnam and outlying regions exist, and with beasts to slay, we simply don our weapons and get on with the matter at hand.

Conversely, the book explores how maddening, how brain-breaking, it must be to live in a cycle of endless dreams, nightmares, death and rebirth. To not even remember your own childhood, only the recurrent Hunt.

(is the dream a nightmare or is the nightmare the waking world)

Imagine living your every day with thoughts like that. No wonder this protagonist doubts his very reality. And it really helps to enrich our appreciation of the original Bloodborne world, where so many before us have already given in to the madness of the hunt.

It’s quite remarkable that Kot is able to successfully prop up The Death Of Sleep as a coherent narrative, considering the state of dubious reality that the protagonist finds himself in. The story is actually quite straightforward, for its part – the hunter is charged with escorting out of Yharnam a child whom he believes to be Paleblood, so that he might transcend the hunt, as he has been told – although ultimately, the fate of our protagonist and his charge are left to our haunted imagination.

Kowalski’s art is a markedly different style than that of Quah or Kokarev: it’s very clean and with plenty of clarity, though with less ‘depth’, being more flat, where the Dark Souls books I’ve looked at felt more ‘three-dimensional’ in terms of the character and environment appearances, if you catch my drift. But this style allows an ideal canvas for Brad Simpson’s colours to paint Yharnam in hues of oppression, disease and blood, from the stark fires and gooping gore that coats the Blood-Starved Beast ever-hunting our protagonist, to the cold solitude of the Fishing Hamlet.

Incidentally, the protagonist cannot see the Amygdalas, but the child can. There’s a really great, spine-tingling scene near the end where they come across an Amygdala watching them while on the ground, and the child guides the hunter around it, all while the hunter has no idea what it is that’s staring him in the face. “Three steps to the right…stop. Do not move…” Shivers.

Last on our platter today is A Song Of Crows, helmed by the same writer-artist team that brought us The Death Of Sleep, and all my same comments about the art style apply here as well.

This volume is all about Eileen The Crow, one of Bloodborne’s dark-horse fan favourite NPCs, of myself included. Maybe it’s that the plague-doctor look is perennially in. Maybe it’s her monastic yet kinda renegade job title, Hunter of Hunters, meant to slay those hunters who have become blood-drunk and gone mad. Maybe her twin siderite blades are just cool. Whatever the case, she definitely deserved a book to herself.

That said, if The Death Of Sleep forged a balance between the madness of Yharnam’s looping dream-nightmare, and a more conventional narrative thrust, A Song Of Crows takes a screaming swan-dive into the deep end of the Nightmare with its mouth wide open. The first chapter makes us think there will be a semi-conventional narrative afoot amid the mind-bending uncertainties of Yharnam, but it is not to be.

I warn you now, A Song Of Crows is trippy. Every single action is one of doubt. Early on, Eileen says, ‘There is a hole at the center of the story’. She’s not wrong. A Song Of Crows chooses to completely eschew any semblance of literary norms, in favour of fully embracing the madness of not knowing who, what or when you are. The last half of the story is almost completely non-verbal, and while I’ve previously lauded graphic novels that let the dialogue take a backseat in many places to let their visuals breathe, you’re not about to be given a clear and easy path through these trippy images. Maybe you’re not meant to.

You are granted eyes.

That is spoken, or thought, on an otherwise black page, after one of the trippiest and most bizarre image-collages in the graphic novel. Every Bloodborne player knows what that means, and so maybe we’re not meant to understand everything here. Maybe this is what it’s like to be exposed firsthand to that good ol’ Yharnam madness without the requisite Insight to really see beyond the pale. Images repeat, events loop, things happen that are not explained, but it’s all meant to be this way.

I really don’t know what to think about A Song Of Crows after multiple reads, first not knowing what I was in for, and the second read getting me no closer to understanding. Mission…accomplished? Your results may very much vary.

I gotta stop thinking about this. My frenzy meter’s starting to rise a little too high.

And that’s it for the Soulsborne graphic novels that I own as of the time of this writing! I might do a follow-up article down the road after I’ve grabbed up more of them, if I feel like there’s enough to say about those that I haven’t already said here.

FromSoft’s Soulsborne games are not at surface level the easiest things in the world to adapt into a more structured and ‘rigid’ form of storytelling. But these books generally do succeed at it, bringing us tales of bit players in larger, possibly unknowable stories, showing us the compelling landscapes of downfall and decay, and balancing on the knife-edge between conventional and trippy, subjective storytelling (or in one case simply attempting a totally free-form book that dwells completely in the realm of avant-garde experimentalism).

Alas, there are no twenty-page scenes of the protagonist getting killed and then having to re-do the past quarter of the book to pick up their souls or blood echoes.

If these sound like the perfect addition to your Soulsborne collection, you’ll be able to find these volumes wherever books are sold.