DESERT OF THE THIRD SIN
The epic re-read of Poison Elves continues with the next volume in the series: Desert of the Third Sin.
When last we left our “hero” Lusiphur the elf, he was headed into the desert to experiment with the magic lamp he got from his ex-wife Hyena. As is par for the course, Lusiphur’s agency is stolen from him by the stupidity of happenstance; the camel he’s riding on acts up and knocks him on his ass. The camel runs off (with Lusiphur’s water and sword still strapped to it), but “luckily” the lamp remains—except now it has broken open and the genie inside comes spilling out.
Since this is a Poison Elves comic, the genie turns out to be a smokeshow lady who looks suspiciously like Hyena—or really any of the other hotties already found in the comic since Drew Hayes doesn’t really have a broad palette of faces and body types when it comes to his women characters. The genie promptly kills Lusiphur, but brings him back when she realizes he isn’t responsible for keeping her penned up in the bottle all these years. She’s pretty nice about it, all things considered, and gives Lusiphur his three wishes with a minimum of twisting his words.
Lusiphur, a simple but greedy creature at heart, quickly names his three wishes: he wants a very specific magical elven sword, supernatural quickness, and an orb that eats souls. Poison Elves posits a novel wrinkle on the way a genie’s wishes work: giving something to the wisher takes something from somewhere else. In the case of the wished-for sword, it disappears from the elven “warduke” who owns it; the same thing happens with the creepy orb, which belongs to a dimension-hopping assassin who looks like a lumpy mutant Neo-Nazi. The superspeed is a little different; it isn’t directly stolen, per se, but it is powered magic pilfered from an elven mage named Tenth.
Of course, all three of them want their shit back, which ushers in the next phase of this arc in the comic. It’s also where the arc seems to run out of ideas. Lusiphur’s fight with the warduke is a pretty straightforward violent brawl ending in the elven lord’s death. Lusiphur’s contest with Tenth is, to put it frankly, cribbed from better issues of Sandman. Lusiphur’s city-shaking battle with the planar assassin ends in a really unsatisfying deus ex-wife situation. The last one also features Parintachin, the edgy undead clown who lines in Lusiphur’s head. To be honest, I read that sequence over a few times and I still don’t feel like I understand what’s happening in it. One result of it is worth noting, though: Lusiphur gets his hands on a modern firearm that never runs out of bullets.
Compounding things is the format of Desert of the Third Sin. Much of these issues are not in a traditional comics format, but rather each page is a single illustration eating three-fourths of a page with a strip of text running alongside it. Unfortunately, this doesn’t really utilize the storytelling strengths of comics as a medium, and the text is often so small and cramped it doesn’t really do justice to prose narrative either.
The Desert of the Third Sin arc ends on a strange montage of where all the various characters introduced up until this point are currently at—weirdly, it feels like Drew Hayes was undecided on if the comic would continue. But continue it does, and I promise it gets better after this early low point. If nothing else, the next volumes, Patrons, is where the standard comic book format leads to some great stand-alone moments.