Advance Review: ‘Edenwood’ #1 Mashes Up A Bunch Of Stuff I Already Like

Welcome to the table,

My 30+ year TTRPG campaign has a major plot point focused on a war between witches and a banished sadist who was cast from this world and came back, took over heaven and hell, and has been shaping time and space to her will. So, when I saw that Image Comics had a new book called Edenwood and the opening description was “An eons-long series of multiverse wars between demons and witches has found Earth as its latest and final battleground,” I was curious, to say the least.

Written and drawn by Tony Daniel with letters by Nathan Kempf, Edenwood opened in a way that I started to worry I had signed on to review something that was not exactly what I was expecting. From the start, it feels like one of those ‘made-for-TV,’ or I guess now ‘made-for-streaming,’ movies about the teen children of Disney Villains, learning the power of friendship while doing their best watered-down Mean Girls impressions to a laugh track that does not quite feel right. But as the TikTok says…

“gots ta’ see it through my boy”

and I am glad I did. 

This book is the kind of thing I would have really liked when I was in my late teens. Hell, I like it now. In the same way, Crimson felt like an angsty teen horror romp back when Cliffhanger was still an imprint, Edenwood feels like it can hit a large audience but there’s a really solid effort being made to cater to the YA readers, and that totally works for the title. It’s “cool” teens in a really brutal situation with world-ending stakes and horrific monsters caught in an eternal war of magic and machinery… and it plays.

I have zero idea what the above cover has to do with the title but it was in the gallery so I am sharing.

Edenwood feels like Zoro meets Full Metal Alchemist meets The Dread Pirate Roberts, by way of a metal album. It’s brutal and violent and pulls on plot devices that work but it does it in such a stylish way that it does not feel offensive. If anything it’s the kind of thing I would return to in the same way I watch John Wick over and over again. It’s a good time and it looks rad as hell.

I really don’t know where this story is going but I am willing to bet more and more of the friends from the first few pages are going to show up dead, mutated, or changed before it’s all said and done and I’m here for it.

Until next time, the reason you get to know what flavors you like of something is so you can eat them again and again. More of the same is not always bad when it is done well.