"Long John Silver: Lady Vivian Hastings" is a throwback to old-school pirates and treasure hunters

There are few modern pirate comics out there, and even fewer that are any good.  Well, enter Long John Silver Part 1: Lady Vivian Hastings, a rousing sea adventure tale of pirates and seamen looking for untold riches in deep within the Amazon.  Illustrated by Mathieu Lauffray with just the right touch of realism and an exaggerated style reminiscent of caricature, this work captures the nuances and details of the nineteenth century world of high seas and dangerous men looking to betray one another at a moment's notice in order to ensure their life's financial security.  It is an imaginative and ambitious work, for both man and child alike.

The writer Xavier Dorison (he is assisted in this aspect by the artist Lauffray) creates characters who are memorable as they are the archetypal symbols of this genre: the under-sexed but bored vixen, Lady Vivian Hastings, a woman who decides to take matters into her own hands and head down to the Amazon after her husband's Guyanacapac expedition; Dr. Livesey, her advisor, who, being aware that Lady Hastings is pregnant with child, tries to dissuade her from going, but to no avail; and of course, there's the titular one-legged character, Long John Silver himself, that timeless product of Robert Louis Stevenson's imagination from Treasure Island, a man grander than adventure itself, still living in this alternate universe, and ready to sail wild and distant oceans in order to gain long lost riches.

The colors and the artwork are grand and joyous, fluctuating from bright reds all the way to dark blacks, without ever giving us an unsatisfactory image.  This world that Lauffray and Dorison have created is full of nostalgia for fans of the classic Hollywood pirate movies of the 1930s and 40s.  Yet this particular Long John Silver epic is more about deception, greed and damnation as a result of moral corruption than it is about seamen wearing eyepatches and swashbuckling each other while hanging on chandeliers and such.  It is a sea faring, treasure seeking adventure for those who still long for such tales without ever leaving their couch.
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