I read Tome One of the webcomic I Roved Out in Search of Truth and Love quite some time ago, having reviewed it here on the blog back in August of 2018.  At the time, I believe author/artist Alexis Flower had just started releasing pages of Tome Two or they began soon after, and I was reading them as they came out.  So, I’ve actually already read this, but totally forgot to write a review when it finished.  Sometime after Tome Two finished and before Tome Three began, the tablet I read it on stopped working properly and I couldn’t access the comic’s page anymore (the page is kind of a beast, and even my laptop has trouble loading it, but my new tablet does quite well).  Fast forward several years and I’ve got a new tablet, and finally got around to getting back to reading the webcomic. However, it had been long enough I wanted to re-read the previous chunk.  So, here we are.

As I mentioned in my first review, it’s important for someone coming to this book to understand that it is, intentionally, pornography.  I don’t mean that in the way some folks seem to think anything more than a chaste kiss on the cheek is pornography.  I mean, this features extremely graphic sexual images, with extended sequences, taking up multiple pages.  And the acts depicted (all between consenting adults, it is important to note), are quite varied across varied spectrums of sexuality.  If that sort of thing bothers you, this isn’t a book for you.

Again, as I mentioned in my previous review, it is more than its graphic content, and is typically quite well written.  It’s a fun, wild Fantasy adventure story.  There are echoes of stuff like Fritz Lieber’s Fafhrd & the Grey Mouser, but also mixes of some other weird stuff.  This second leg of Cinder and Maeryll’s grand adventure has them traveling with pirates, meeting elder gods, and seeing strange new lands and worlds.  In the meantime, weird villains are working against them, and a mysterious ex-lover of Maeryll’s closes in on them for unknown, likely sinister reasons.

Flower’s art is very cool.  It’s genuinely some of the best I’ve ever seen for a webcomic, and is better than 90% of what is published by mainstream comic producers.  It has a painterly quality that I really dig.  A wide cast of characters is juggled well, so that you pretty much always know who you’re looking at, and each one has a distinct voice.  There are a couple of bland, semi-generic dudes who I sometimes mix up, but they also don’t show up very often, so it’s not a huge deal.  When they do, I either spend a moment trying to remember who the hell they are, or more often, just read through and promptly forget them again when the scene is done. The rest of the cast, though, very well differentiated.

With the previous caveat about content, I do recommend giving it a read if you’re looking for a cool Fantasy adventure quest that doesn’t fall back on a lot of the typical Northwestern European tropes.  Nor does it veer into the uglier side of sex comics you often see coming out of some of the European stuff, like what used to show up in Heavy Metal (Druuna, I’m looking at you!).

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