Knights, Vol. 1

By Minoru Murao
Published by DMP
Rating: Young Adults (16+)

The less attached to Christianity you are, the more you might enjoy Knights, which takes place during a time period no organized religion would be proud to claim: the age of mass purging known as “witch hunt hysteria.”

As innocent people are subjected to sham trials, sentenced to death, and burned alive, hope comes to the fictional kingdom of Excludo in the form of Mist, a squire willing to defy the knights’ oath to serve the church. In fact, Mist takes his fight against the witch hunts very seriously, having known the downside of religious intolerance all his life. Although skilled enough to be a knight, he has always been treated as an outsider due to his dark skin, and is reasonably surprised when Nina, a daughter of nobility whom he saves from the witches’ pyre in the series’ first adventure, takes a fancy to him.

Knights, however, is more interested in smiting those who would use the public’s fear of witchcraft to acquire wealth and power than in romance. Too bad the adventures themselves are mediocre at best: writer/artist Minoru Murao has trouble settling on a consistent tone, there are logic gaps, and the villains – who are, of course, all Christians – are too over-the-top evil to be interesting.

Throughout volume one, the heroes run afoul of vile priests, as well as a self-righteous saint with lethal hair, who kills a woman for doubting her own impurity – even though the method by which she had been judged was clearly inaccurate. That scene was a bit much, and I had a similar to reaction to all of Murao’s men and women of the cloth and/or cross. They’re not just misguided, but depicted as masochistic; not just evil, but gleefully, sneeringly so. Unfortunately, by making these characters into one-dimensional caricatures, lengthy fight scenes involving them become downright torturous to read.

Meanwhile, there are occasional story glitches that can leave readers scratching their heads: in one chapter, Mist approaches a tower where Nina is being held prisoner inside; the only windows are about three stories high, and, as another knight tells him, the doors are locked from inside. Mist does eventually get in by leaping through one of the aforementioned windows, but how he managed this miraculous feat is never explained.

On the plus side, the art is suitably flashy whenever the broadswords get broken out, and at one point, Murao does an effective job cutting back-and-forth between Mist and his partner Euphemia, who are each battling magically-powered creatures. Yet I will be eternally curious why a character like Euphemia – a scantily-dressed “witch” who releases aphrodisiacs into the air, then has sex with everyone – had to be included at all. Not only does her costume, which is essentially a cape and some pasties, contrast drastically with the seemingly-authentic-looking medieval garb around her, her motif of spontaneous orgies feels downright silly next to Knights’ otherwise dead-serious tone. Perhaps the creator is hoping it has a be-witching effect on male teenage audiences.

Volume one of Knights is available now.