Tour #20 and 21: Shadow Wing

We’ve taken all of the printed and in-game material and arranged it into a roughly thematic order within each expansion and we plan to go through the story using a number of thematically appropriate toons. We’ll be discussion our impressions here. Be warned: our discussions will contain spoilers for all currently published Warcraft material. This isn’t meant for first timers, but for old timers like us to experience it in a new way.You can find our tentative list here.

Note: Shadow Wing is a duology consisting of the two Manga titled The Dragons of Outland and Nexus Point.

Sonaira says:

In the kindest possible terms, this wasn’t for me.

It was confusing, repetitive, failed to hold my interest, and wasn’t improved at all by the art. The main plot is the mystery that the eggs Deathwing had sent to Draenor in Beyond the Dark Portal turned into nether dragons. Treating it as a mystery is one of the biggest disservice the plot does, however, as it seems this would already be known to the readers (maybe), so it’s not a mystery so much as a slog.

It’s position in the timeline is a bit murky, though. The books take place following patch 2.4 Fury of the Sunwell, easily evident by its prominent mentions of Kalec and Anveena. Which means we mis-placed this in our reread and should have read it much later. If that’s the case, then the readers would likely already know the big “mystery.” But.

The story also contains Draenei and Broken who apparently don’t know who the races of Azeroth are and are astounded to see a group of Paladins. It also heavily referenced the quest chain in Shadowmoon where you end up killing Zuluhed and rescuing Karynaku. That apparently hasn’t happened in the manga’s timeline and I genuinely wasn’t sure if it was supposed to be a callback or foreshadowing to that questline, which is one example of poor craft in a story full of them.

You may notice I’m talking more about continuity than contents and that’s because figuring out the puzzling timeline is the most interesting part of this duology. It’s full of characters the author cares about but that readers aren’t given any reason to. There’s a cute little stinger with Malygos at the Nexus, but that again just brings me back around to where you can place these books.

And…all the…characters talk like…this.

I’m no stranger to either comics or manga, and I was really looking forward to this. Unfortunately, it leaves me with a sense of ennui and dread for when we do get to The Sunwell Trilogy.

(NB: I have an acknowledged dislike of Knaak as an author, and I attempted to account for that and read with an open mind. I’m not perfect, though, so if you do like Knaak’s work, you may well enjoy this.)

Shoryl says:

I’d like to start by getting some issues I had with the design choices out of the way:

• I understand the desire to have narration in a different font than dialogue, but the narration needs to be in a readable font. The small type combined with the faux Olde English font made it very difficult to read.
• Art is a huge part of manga, as it should be telling at least half the story. While I might enjoy a piece or two in the art style presented here, I found it distracting. It may have worked as a style for color work, but this was black and white, and there just wasn’t enough variation or texture in the images to work for me in that format.

Now, on to the story itself. I thought I might appreciate this a bit more than I did because I like dragons, I was curious about what Deathwing was really up to in Beyond the Dark Portal, and I suspected it had something to do with the nether dragons. But the writing was lackluster, the story didn’t have any particularly interesting beats, and the characters were just none I’d ever heard of. By this point, I should have heard of somebody!

While I was quite pleased that this story had very little to do with orcs, I was disappointed that there wasn’t really much to it. It was mostly a dragon acting like a petulant child and a paladin who was infatuated with her to the point of distracting him from his duties.