Screenwriter, Dennis MaGee Fallon contacted me a couple weeks ago—well, maybe a few weeks—with a press release package and first issue of Plague, wondering if I'd review it. Although I rarely read comics as a youngster and try and avoid them as an adult, because of the saturation-level political correctness, Plague grabbed my attention, because if there is one trope I hate more than civically-bond superheroes, it's elves!

Hell, if I managed to get Jenifer Anniston in the sack and found out she had wings pinned to her back, I'd toss her out of bed and take up my pimp cane and drive her out into the Baltimore night.

But lo and behold, on the cover of Plague was a graphic of Templars skewering winged elves—shish-kebabing sacred fairies, for Tolkien's sake! I could certainly get behind some elf carnage and awoke enough from my stupor to read on.

I began plague without reading the press material, as I wanted to see if it would be one of those rare comics that I might actually buy off the rack when I used to pick my son up from the comic shop where he played cards. The graphics are excellent—but what grabbed me was the date, 1352. Plague is an historic comic, a pretty neglected thing in our sissy, amnesiac twilight or ideas. Then, on the second page I found out that's I'd opened up a unique storybook, about a late medieval world where the Black Death killed not only men, but brought the "fey folk" the beings of the fairy dimension, to the brink of Oblivion.

The Fey King is dying.

The creatures of fairy are under attack by the unmasking plague and their "fell beasts..."

And the plot stands up to the setting with the introduction of a conflicted character, a young monk who is the orphaned son of a purged Templar who had once sought refuge in a fey wood from the long arm of the King of France. If you have seen the 1980s movie, Never Ending Story, the concept is similar but grounded in the grit, grime and skullduggery of our inhumane, human history.

In Plague, Fallon seems to have found a fitting outlet for a Gaelic longing for Ireland and the cosmology that was nearly snuffed out by the wicked invaders that spent a millennia ravaging the most mystical of Europe's primal races. Having read Plague on the heels of rereading Dermond's Bane by Robert E. Howard, the thought struck me that this issue might be the only comic that Robert E. Howard would have approved of, a clever alternative fantasy set in the Isles of the eerie fringe of an ailing world.

Checkout Plague at the links below and see for yourself. Unless Dennis and Jason write LGBT amputees into the story I expect to continue following this darkling tale.

PLAGUE ISSUE ONE is available for sale on and wherever fine comics are sold.

For interviews & review copies info@dennisfallon.com