Brotherhood of the Wolf: The Lesser Evil

In fifteenth-century Constantinople, teenager Nikephoros has dreams of one day joining the military and maybe even becoming an archon. His mother, Polychronia, supports him and has set him up for success but wishes he’d cut ties with his mischievous friend Adam. Her concerns appear to be well-founded—an older boy from a lower social class, Adam sometimes has a way of leading Nikephoros into sticky situations. Case in point, after nibbling at his breakfast, the two friends meet up and Adam leads them almost right away to something he discovered a few days before: a hole in the wall of a grimy alley, small enough to be easy to miss but plenty big enough for a couple of teenagers to crawl through.

Against his better judgment, Nikephoros agrees to go exploring by lamplight. The pair finds a sprawling series of tunnels inside and, at length, a larger subterranean chamber where everything goes wrong. Later, only one of the teens emerges from the system of tunnels, exhausted, injured, and in shock. Behind closed doors, it’s revealed that one character knows more about the ordeal than they let on, and the reader is reminded of the introduction—of “people being sucked into the earth,” and “bodies found with strange punctures, drained entirely of blood.”

Here’s where things get… interesting. Ezra L.C. and Wes Al-Dhaher’s Brotherhood of The Wolf: The Lesser Evil takes a unique approach to storytelling by pivoting at the halfway mark from prose to pictures. There’s potential for some dramatic story reveals, but the results in this instance are mixed. The twelve pages of direct and relatively strong writing are effective at setting the stage and introducing Nikephoros and his mother, Polychronia. But the transition in the latter thirteen to wordless, rapid-fire, comic book-style illustrations from artist Aurelio Mazzarra feels jarring and out of place. In fact, were it not for the tenuous connection to a few key words in the final paragraphs of the written portion (and a confirmation on the final page), a reader might be forgiven for concluding that someone at the printing press stitched two stories together by mistake.

Still, Mazzarra’s depiction of gladiatorial combat—attended by vampires and various other ghouls—is impressive to behold. It’s worth slowing down for, and readers who take the time to study each panel will marvel and wince in equal measure. Combined with L.C. and Al-Dhaher’s writing, anyone looking for an ephemeral horror story will find plenty to enjoy in Brotherhood of The Wolf: The Lesser Evil

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