Comic Review: Critical Role: The Tales of Exandria: The Bright Queen #1

Dark Horse Comics

Writer: Darcy Van Poelgeest and The Cast of Critical Role

Art: CoupleofKooks

Colors: Chris Peter

Letters: Ariana Maher

If you’re a fan of tabletop games you’ve likely heard of Critical Role in the past couple of years. What started as a web-series featuring Matt Mercer hosting a dnd game for a bunch of his voice actor friends, has become hugely popular and the cast are now at the beginning of their third campaign. As a DM and player of Dungeons & Dragons myself, I’ve loved watching the series grow from strength to strength over the years and found it very inspiring. There have been numerous spin offs from the franchise including a hugely successful Kickstarter for an animated adaptation for their first campaign. The Tales of Exandria isn’t Critical Role’s first foray into the world of comic books either. There’s already an origin series for their first campaign, Vox Machina, and original volumes for the Campaign Two characters are on their way this year. The Tales of Exandria is another recent offshoot, and instead of following the campaign’s main characters, this looks to follow other characters and events in the world the campaign is set in, a  continent called Exandria.

This first issue centres around one of the enigmatic figures introduced in Campaign 2 – Leylas Kryn, the Queen of the Drow community in Xorhas, known also as the Bright Queen. We follow Captain Quana, a drow knight, who is also the lover of the Bright Queen and his experiences in search of the mysterious Beacon. It also acts something of an origin story for the Kryn dynasty and their central religion, which is based around the Luxon. As such, this first issue is incredibly lore-heavy and focuses heavily on the worldbuilding. Sitting at a fairly short page count, it tries to pack in an awful lot in this brief length and ultimately, this feels quite limited – we see more of an overview then any real in depth look at the Bright Queen herself.

This initial comic feels very much for the fans of the series, especially given the dense lore presented, much of which would be very confusing for people not in the know. This also gives it a sense of being quite fanservicey, as not a lot going on really.  It does really show off the more unusual drow culture, which was never fully explored in the campaign itself, and despite their lack of screen-time together, there is real emotion between Quana and the Bright Queen. We don’t get a real sense for their history together but he’s clearly portrayed as being someone very important to her, and someone who clearly had a great effect on the Bright Queen. I couldn’t help but wish there had been more to the story however, and I finished the issue feeling rather underwhelmed – there’s so much mystery around the Bright Queen’s character but ultimately I felt like I didn’t know her much better after this comic. The amount of lore, whilst interesting, really hampered the actual plot and pacing in this issue unfortunately and dampened the impact of the actual story being told.

The artwork is one of the stronger things about this comic, and there was a stylistic choice to use a lot of subdued, dark and red colour tones throughout. It’s very in keeping with the darker world of Xorhas and seeing the landscapes of this environment is a great experience. The front cover and contents page artwork in particular are gorgeous and really give off the mythic, epic fantasy vibes. The artwork in the comic itself is more simplistic and less detailed but does a good job of presenting the characters and events.

All in all, this first comic in the Tales of Exandria series was something of a miss for me, but I did find it really interested to delve more into the parts of the world we had never seen before, and hopefully the following issues will feature more of this and less lore dumping.