There’s an old saying: it’s always the quiet ones you have to watch out for. Well, while Liliy’s contemporary fantasy The Adventures of Wiglaf and Mordred may not be the quietest of comics, I must say I was still quite surprised and perhaps a bit disturbed by the events that just happened. Of course, looking back I am not sure if I should be surprised, seeing that early on Liliy included a psychotic swordsman, had her version of King Arthur end up being a retired tyrant and villain, and had a crazed doctor dissecting an immortal just for kicks. But despite these more bloody hijinks, there is something truly malevolent with the latest comic.
The weird thing is, this almost came out of the blue. While there were a few rumblings that the secret cult that had been enchanting people into objects (such as Mordred’s orb and Azrael’s sword) was not quite as inept as had been portrayed up until this time (I mean, giant lasers? Grousing about electricity bills?), it took Malachi (the cult’s leader) using his artifact to teleport Driver’s eye out of its socket for things to truly take a turn for the ominous. Malachi eating the eyeball (and Liliy showing him plopping the intact eyeball with optic nerve into his mouth) was just icing on a most disturbing cake.
Ironically, I’m not sure as to the impact this will have for readers. It has long been a running gag that Driver keeps her eyes covered by her hair and her hat. Thus while we’d be forced to watch a different character run around with an eyepatch or the like, Driver losing an eye will quickly fade into the collective background and mean more to the characters than the readers. Admittedly, it might be an interesting change for Liliy to start drawing Driver with her hair back and sporting an eyepatch (which will undoubtedly increase her charm and reputation as a badass with readers), ultimately this act appears to be more for the shock value than for long-lasting significance in the story… which seems out of character for the comic as a whole.