The Plague Doktor is the six-year-old brain child of David M. Brown (The Magician, and Modern Animals) with art by Dennis Coyle III. Published by 5th Dimension who makes comics for people who like their coffee black. After working with these guys before they gave me a chance to sneak peek this new book while it’s being funded on Kickstarter.

Taken place in the age of the Black Death, the Plague Doktor works as a symbol of hope for the hopeless. This tales follows our main hero as he works as the one good plague doktor in a profession filled with conmen and swindlers, looking to overcome his nightmares of his adversary. Like always Brown takes a new concept and gives it a dark gritty tone with a great story to match. This book is filled with actions, twists, and turns. I’ve read this book twice and it seemed to improve and flow even better the second time. While this was one of the first books that Brown had written, you can see he has revised it and polished it to make something great over the last six years. The attention to detail, and all around good story to match makes this another outstanding book by Brown.

The art is set mostly in black, white and shades of blue, adding more to the grit and darkness of the story. This is my first time seeing Coyle work, but it adds the extra flair much-needed in this book. Like most comics, the art can have a few average panels, but during the fight scenes, and stand alone panels is where the art really shines in this one. The panel work is amazing without using much of the standard nine grids, but putting in split pages, full pages and panels that are different from the modern-day comics.

The comic itself is 55 pages, and presented in both a digital (which I read for the review) and physical version(which I funded on the kickstarter). It’s also filled with 26 pages of extras, from concept art, scripting, variant covers, and character concepts.

3.5/5 – I backed this book on kickstarter within the first 24 hours, and really enjoyed the Plague Doktor. While I know this isn’t for everyone because of the darker, more mature story, I think it will be a special book for people who are interested in that kind of story.

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