Review: ‘Unnatural Order’ #1 Starts Off Strange In The Best Possible Ways

Welcome to the table,

When I was a kid, I often wondered why I was disabled. For the most part, I was told if I prayed hard enough, and loved the gilded god enough, I would be healed through some kind of mystical intervention. A magical wind would come down and make me “normal” and take away all the pain and discomfort.

So I prayed and prayed and tried so hard to be all the things their books and wealthy dudes at church said I needed to be. Now, I am sorry to tell you that to this day, I’m still disabled. A youth in contemplation of why my words were not as meaningful as others did give me time to think through.

If the god of the pulpit and kneeling pew was not going to hear my plea, would another? Why did the old gods in my mythology books just need bravery and guile to show favor to their followers but this dude with a flowing beard and the hair of a 70’s rocker need all my quarters in his magic bowl and my undying devotion? If I was doing everything as requested, and it was still not good enough, something must have been wrong with the world.

I left childhood thinking…

“This is not how the world is supposed to be.”

Unnatural Order #1 from Vault Comics feels like it takes that feeling of the ontological unknown and blends it with a compelling story hook and really solid art.

Written by Christopher Yost, with art by Val Rodrigues, colors by Dearbhla Kelly, and letters by Andworld Design this book has a lot going on on the surface but the roots of this twisted tree grow deep and touch on theological themes that I have not often seen explored in the comic space.

The story picks up after the fall of the Britons and the Roman invasion of Hibernia. A strange captive known only as the Druid is released, sending an unearthly magical darkness across the world and ushering in an age of horrors, monsters, fires, and pain.

A ragtag band of adventurers who feels like they are pulled from the coolest parts of history or your weekly D&D game join together and fight creatures of the night, share stories of cosmic horror, and enter the burning landscape of The Wicker fields to free a soldier from a different time and place. Why would they do such a thing? Because this soldier knows that “this is not how the world is supposed to be.”

Unnatural Order feels like a battle of faiths as the gods of the old clash with the new gods. Not those new gods of kneeling pew and gilded pulpit, but of something far more clinical and sinister. Arthur C. Clarke once said “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic” and unnatural order feels like a story that has that sentiment stamped on its very DNA.

Until next time, pick this book up if you have the chance. It’s really a delight.

If you have read this far there are minor spoilers below.

This book has fantastic character development. There is a fight between the aforementioned party and a band of werewolves that is some of the best conversational combat I have seen in comics in a while. Really strong writing and economical pacing of the story is going to either make this a seriously fun short romp through a strange space or a sprawling epic that will go down in the books as one of the coolest weird fiction comics of our time.