What I Bought 12/18/2020 - Part 4

The last new comic reviews of 2020. Not the last 2020 new comics that will be reviewed, mind you, since there's still a few things I'm waiting on from these last couple weeks. You know what I mean. Fittingly enough, it's the final issue of a series.

Sera and the Royal Stars #10, by Jon Tsuei (writer), Audrey Mok (artist), Raul Angulo (colorist), Jim Campbell (letterer) - That's it everybody, look thoughtful for your senior photo.

Everybody fights. The Draco siblings turn themselves into a big, two-headed dragon. No symbiotes, though. The Royal Stars are on "E", so the fight's not going too well. The best they can really manage is to keep the dragon from taking to the air, blind one of them in one eye. Which I actually like. They can't just find some special wellspring of extra power to fight on equal terms. What they've got is all they've got, and they have to make do. Keep the Dracos focused on them and give Sera the chance to use the big sword. So I like how the fight plays out.

And it enough for Sera to cut them back into two, and then run Rastaban through. Which turns him to stone, kills him, something. The sword vanishes, too. Nobody wants to keep it as a souvenir? Eltanin flies off swearing vengeance, but the seal on the Stars is broken, so they can go chill in their actual stars and recover. The seasons can return, and life on Earth is probably safe. For humans to wipe out themselves, I mean. Hooray!

 

Surprisingly, Sera, her sister, and their mother decide they can't return home, since Sera's sketchy uncle is running Parsa now. It might cause succession issue questions, which could cause a rebellion. So they'll let the guy prove he can do the job, and if not, then they'll show up and kick his ass. I mean, if they wanted a vacation they could just say so. It's perfectly understandable. 

Also it leaves them open to the possibility of more adventures as they travel, in case Tsuei and Mok decide they want to come back to this book someday, I imagine.

One thing I'm left wondering about is, Mithra took Sera's heart and replaced it with Regulus' gem thing. Now Regulus seems to be back to his old self. So did Sera get her heart back? Or does she still have the gem thing, which got cracked by Eltannin a couple of issues ago? I'm guessing the gem, because she still has the red striping under her eyes from when she sort of fully claimed Regulus' power last issue (which I feel like raises questions about him of its own). That wouldn't seem like the best thing to be relying on for keeping yourself alive.

I liked the series. I would have been fine with it going on for longer, and if we do get a sequel someday, I'd almost certainly give it a whirl, assuming the same creative team is on the books. I thought there were going to be a lot more Stars, but Tsuei kept it to four, which made it easier to give them distinct personalities, and tended to have the heroes split into smaller groups, which lets you advance the plot in multiple places and gives everyone a chance to be useful in some way. Mok's work isn't anything terribly flashy, but it's expressive and I really like the character designs. How the Royal Stars have certain similarities in their clothes, but each is different. Same with the Dracos, same with Sera and her family. It makes them look cool and distinctive.