Terraria Volume 1 by Grant Alter, Brendan J. Vogel, Matt Clingempeel & Iwan Nazif

with colors by Digikore and letters by the talented Dave Lanphear.

So let’s be honest: I found this book entirely confusing. It doesn’t help that the entirety of the second chapter was presented not backwards but bizarrely out of order. It was about Vale and Levi going to look for answers in other people’s homes, maybe? That lack of attention to detail doesn’t inspire confidence in the final product, which has apparently had its actual publication date pushed back several times. Or it might be out already! Details online are very confusing still.

What I can gather from the digital edition I read is that the book is based on a video game of the same name (which I’d never heard of despite being part of a family of gamers.) It seems to be a pretty open sandbox where you get to decide how you play, whether as a village sim, a quest RPG or a hack and slash. The main character Vale is clearly a stand in for the average player, as he’s been adopted by a small village and has a cute pet rabbit named Alma. When a battered teenager falls on his adopted family’s doorstep one day, claiming to be the only survivor of a neighboring zombie-ravaged village, Vale and various other family members go on a quest to find out what’s going on. Bloodshed and heroics inevitably ensue.

Even ignoring the bizarre formatting of the second chapter, I found this book to be long on action and short on logic. It’s a video game comic, I get it. But it feels more like “here’s a bunch of cool things!” than a coherent story. Perhaps fans of the video game will have better touchstones off of which to understand the references: as someone unfamiliar with the property, I felt it was inexplicably random and woefully under-explained. For example, what was going on with Alma in the first chapter, and why did it never happen again? There was also a concerning lack of emotion, particularly on Vale’s part. That might have been appropriate for a video game, where you don’t want to bore the player with a billion cut scenes before letting them take over the action, but seemed a really odd choice for a book, where you want to know what’s going on in the characters’ heads. I did like Helen a lot tho, even if some of her story didn’t make a ton of sense either.

The art is actually quite fun, and does its best to make up for the weird script. I also appreciated Grant Alter’s afterword discussing the process of putting together the comic book, especially for the way it gave me a deeper appreciation of the letterer’s job. This book makes for perfectly fine reading for kids (especially ones who enjoy Terraria) to pass the time with but is incredibly flimsy on story otherwise. Hopefully, they’ll fix the issues with Chapter Two before print as well.

Terraria Volume 1 by Grant Alter, Brendan J. Vogel, Matt Clingempeel & Iwan Nazif was published November 19 2024 by 50 Amp Productions and is available from all good booksellers, including 50 Amp Productions.