Other reviewers must have gotten a different file than I did, because I would not call the text crisp. It's legible, though.

I mainly bought it for the pictures, anyway — nice photos of miniatures (some set up in evocative scenes), plus paintings reprinted from various RPG products. Some of the photos seems a little fuzzy, but I think it may be slight blur in the original compounded by the scan. I don't have a hard copy anymore, so I can't compare.

I have nothing to say about the rules. I read them years ago, but never got any minatures or co-players.

Starts off unclear, heads into some not overly engaging robot stuff, but finishes strong with a clever surprise. Now where's the rest of the anthology?

The writing style is possibly even more awkward than in the first issue; I ended up just skimming the text. I'm still sticking with the series for its decent visual rendition of a fantasy setting. This issue's highlight: goblins!

I rated this three stars because I want to read more fantasy comics and this helps scratch that itch, but if you don't have a similar unfulfilled jones you should probably subtract a star. The sense of characters' motivations is shaky, their speaking idioms waver between archaism and modernism, and the text is riddled with extra adjectives and fresh-minted compound words, all of which makes for awkward reading. But I get to look at pictures of elves and monsters and medeival-ish settings doing their thing. Some panels especially please me with their visuals: The bridge and ruins at the top of page 5, the top of page 8 where the clear linework and vivid coloring give the two elven settings a feeling of both solidity and magic, the depiction of magical energy at the bottom left of page 8, the well-constructed double-page brawl on page 14. I hope the writing improves because I expect to continue reading for at least another issue.

Both stories have decent art but shaky writing. The premise in the first story isn't all that strong, but it's identifiable; not sure what the second story's is beyond "heroes & villains in space".

The writing has that sort of overheated comic-book noir feel to it -- not my cuppa tea, but I know some people dig that. Works well enough as an introduction in that it communictaes some of the concept and tells a little story. File size is way too big.

Uneven, but by the end I'm intrigued enough to want to read more.The art is pretty good aside from occasional iffy rendering and some unrealistic looking chests. Ther story features occasional clunky dialogue ("Who...Who the hell are you?" "Hell...how appropriate*.") and an eye-rolling stock scene (the 2 women's encounter with hoodlums), but there's a nice human feel to some of the conversations. We're shown enough of the supernatural element to catch interest but not enough to know what's really going on yet, so I feel reasonably satisfied but want to read more (as is appropriate for an intro). The larger story might live up to its promise or fall to its weaknesses, but I'm interested enough to find out which.

There's a guy trying to track down another guy for some reason, and then there's another mysterious group of guys who are killing people in their effort to track someone down. The lone guy's quest takes him to one of those unfriendly-small-towns-harboring-some-kind-of-secret that crop up in stories -- this one seems to contain mostly burly dudes. I don't know what's going on in this book and it doesn't give me much reason to care. On the other hand, aside from some over-the-top dude-burliness the art's pretty good. The night driving panels, for example, are beautiful.

On a technical note, the file is an absurdly huge 79 MB for 27 pages. I understand it's a hassle to put in the extra work to convert a print-quality PDF into one appropriate for screen-reading (or vice-versa), but come on.

The premise sounding intriguing, so I gamely followed the murky, occasionally-hard-to-follow art through the funeral and homecoming visits until the main character's visit with an old girlfriend. Her first line after greetings is, "Can you believe it's been eighteen years since you took my cherry?" I assume that's plausible dialogue for someone, somewhere, but it yanked me right out of the story. The rest of the scene isn't as bad as that, but by the next scene I gave up and just skimmed the rest.

I don't think the quality level here is that high, but it's also not quite aimed at my tastes so you could add a star to my rating to account for that.

"Aposperus" slowly introduces its main character but doesn't give much story. The art has some interesting effects and is probably the best part of the whole book (though it has a few unfortunate moments with an awkward fumetti look).

The wordless "In the Demon's Path" gives us a rescue/fight scene with a "twist" ending; it didn't engage me in any way.

I basically agree with Matt B. about "31 Flavors".

I skipped the wrestling story because I'd already downloaded a preview for that separately -- haven't read it yet.

Given that this is sampler it'd be nice to have a little more context. There were some awkward transitions in the story; I'm hoping it's just that the book collects a few batches of discontinous pages and the publisher didn't bother to indicate that. The story has some possibly intrguing elements and the art is decent, but the sampler could maybe use some tweaking as a package.

I'd hoped that Book of Urgrayne would serve as a good intro to Artesia; unfortunately it seems to be more of a supplement for fans. The art is excellent but I don't have enough background to make these stories meaningful.