In Review: The Scorpion – In The Name Of The Son

By Jeremy Briggs on August 22, 2014

The Scorpion returns with In The Name Of The Son, the fourth part of the latest ongoing story of the swashbuckling 18th century rogue who is trying to discover who his father was and his battles with the less-than-holy Pope Trebaldi which are written by Stephen Desberg and illustrated by Enrico Marini.

Trebaldi’s warrior monks have been deserting him due to lack of pay and attacks by The Scorpion and in desperation the Pope frees and sanctifies lepers to get them to fight for him. In the meantime The Scorpion, believing Trebaldi to be his father as well as the one to condemn his mother to death by burning at the stake, gets closer to discovering the truth behind both the Trebaldi family’s, and his own, history via a mysterious scarred man.

The political machinations and intrigue of Desberg’s on-going story are now reaching a stage that makes them both difficult to summarise for those that haven’t read them and difficult to talk about without giving too much away for those that have. However in this book, via flashbacks, both the reader and The Scorpion discover the truth that he has been fighting to discover over the course of all the previous books. Yet despite the build-up this is not the climax to this story as The Scorpion’s rather complicated love-life comes to the fore once again and the other families of Rome vie for dominance.

Marini’s artwork is as beautiful as always from the dynamic sword fights with the leper monks to the exposition and character heavy panels within the Vatican while his establishing panels for each new location are magnificently detailed. The potentially confusing flashbacks often use a different colour palette and text boxes to the ongoing story to help differentiate them from the story’s main time period.

The first story arc of The Scorpion was played out over six French albums which Cinebook published over four books (the two earliest books had two albums each) so this current ongoing story has the potential to continue for another two books. That said this is another series where Cinebook have caught up on the French publications and the next French album, Le Secret Des Trebaldi, is due to be published on 7 November 2014.

The Scorpion – In The Name Of The Son continues this complex tale with the same strong plotting and lovely artwork that we have come to expect from Stephen Desberg and Enrico Marini.

• There are more details of The Scorpion books on the Cinebook website

• There are more details of the French Scorpion books on the Le Scorpion website (in French)

• The next book in The Scorpion series, Le Secret Des Trebaldi, will be published in France on 7 November 2014. A UK publication date has yet to be announced by Cinebook.

• Cinebook will be attending the Lakes International Comic Art Festival in Kendal over the weekend of 17 to 19 October 2014 where their sales table will in the Comics Clock Tower.

Jeremy Briggs

News, reviews, interviews and features for print and on-line: Spaceship Away (since October 2005), Bear Alley (since February 2007), downthetubes (since June 2007), and Eagle Times (since October 2008). Plus DC Thomson’s The Art Of Ian Kennedy, Titan’s Dan Dare and Johnny Red reprints, Ilex’s War Comics: A Graphic History and 500 Essential Graphic Novels, and Print Media’s The Iron Moon and Strip magazine.