The Marquis Volume 1: Inferno

by Guy Davis, Guy Davis (Illustrator)

Overview

In eighteenth-century Venisalle, faith governs life and death, and the guilty hide their shame behind masks, showing their faces only in the secret rites of the confessional. It is to this stronghold of the Inquisition that the souls of Hell have escaped to possess the living, spreading sin, murder, and chaos. Amid the carnage, one man is blessed with the clarity to recognize the demons that prey on his countrymen — and the means to return them to the fires of Hell. But as the stakes rise, the lines separating good and evil begin to blur, and the Marquis — the dark avenger whom even demons fear to cross — finds himself torn between the blind faith that has defined his life and the bitter truths exposed under his new sight.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781621157960
Publisher:	Dark Horse Comics
Publication date:	08/11/2009
Sold by:	Penguin Random House Publisher Services
Format:	eBook
Pages:	336
File size:	240 MB
Note:	This product may take a few minutes to download.

About the Author

Michigan-based artist Guy Davis spent his youth drawing and sketching monsters and aliens, with an imagination fed on a healthy dose of late night creature features and monster mags! It was after graduating and not really having any idea of what to do with himself outside of drawing, that he decided to try and continue in comics. In 1984 he created a tongue-in-cheek space opera "Quonto of the Star Corps" for the small press Fantastic Fanzine. Quonto was soon forgotten but the fanzine would later become Arrow Comics and lead to work on the comic series The Realm.

After a few years at Arrow Comics, his work on The Realm would take him to Caliber Press and his first creator owned series with Gary Reed; the Harvey Award nominated Baker Street. It was Baker Street that led him to DC/Vertigo and Sandman Mystery Theatre with Matt Wagner and Steve Seagle. Since then he has worked for most of the major comic publishers along with providing artwork and conceptual design for various role-playing games, as well as Guillermo del Toro's projects Pacific Rim, The Strain, and Crimson Peak. He resides with his fiancée, Rosemary Van Deuren, along with a menagerie of pets and a trio of horse skulls named Becky, Conrad and Steptoe.

Editorial Reviews

In this morality adventure set in a starkly rendered 17th-century France, the eponymous protagonist dons a carnival mask and hunts escaped souls of the damned. The twist is that behind the marquis's mask is no dashing hero but a geriatric church inquisitor named Vol de Galle who is pious, fearful and uncertain of himself. He has good reason for doubt; the escaped souls inhabit the bodies of lowly French sinners who look like regular townsfolk and only de Galle can perceive their true beastly forms. The marquis leaves a trail of corpses that soon has the authorities, religious and secular, hot on his heels and places him in the center of a debate over his real nature, the provenance of his powers and the true measure of his faith. That overlengthy debate is mere background for the real matter at hand: disgusting devil-monsters dying in interesting ways. Davis's artwork features pages of heavily inked cityscapes crammed with gothic spires and rococo entablature, and squat and grotesque characters—both satanic and human—drawn in high contrast black-and-white. It's an entertaining if not always serious outing. (Sept.)

Publishers Weekly