Book Review: Bloodborne, Vol. 3 - A Song of Crows

 

Eileen the Crow is probably one of the most interesting NPC's you encounter throughout Bloodborne. With her striking crow-like design and her layered questline she definitely stands out for a lot of players as a fan favourite character. So when I saw that Volume 3 of the Titan Comics' Bloodborne series was devoted to her in its entirety, I was rather excited.  Getting to delve into a personal story which fleshed her out even more was a brilliant proposition. Sadly though I feel like this volume doesn't capitalise on the concept as much as I hoped. There is some glimmer of quality in here but it's lost in a sea of flaws. 

Titled A Song of Crows, this third volume in the series of comic books also holds the same creative credits as the previous two volumes. Written by Aleš Kot, illustrated by Piotr Kowalski, colourised by Brad Simpson and Kevin Enhart and lettered by Aditya Bidikar.

The narrative behind this volume as previously stated, follows Eileen the Crow as she embarks on a journey through the streets of Yharnam on the night of a Blood Moon. After following through on some of her regular duties, Eileen comes across a defiled corpse which is displayed in a position which triggers some repressed memories for the hunter. What follows is a vivid and visual trudge through Eileen's past as she attempts to piece together the relevance of what is happening presently with what happened in her past. This experience will take her all over Yharnam as she seeks to confront the mystery at hand all the while combatting a number of chaotic visons as she gets closer to the truth. 

The narrative portion of this volume falls back into the same issue the first volume had but even worse in my opinion. It's provides the concept of a interesting story but it fails constantly to deliver it in a way that feels satisfying to experience. It's a constant run of teases and vague implications that amount to very little by the stories end. You can obtain some sense of what is happening by paying attention to the visuals but that novelty dies out very quickly as the visuals begin to get more and more lucid.  What narration is included with this comic doesn't help either because it's extremely indistinct. Eileen often at times repeats the same abstract phrases and there's very little comprehension that can come from them.  It's a story which seems to enjoy it's ambiguity and makes it a point to be deliberately unclear, but from my own perspective it made for a very frustrating read because the other supporting factors can't offer much more foundation for the story to stand on.

The reason I won't dismiss this volume completely though is because of it's art style. This is easily the best illustrated volume out of the three I've read so far. The benefit with this story going down trippy and abstract route is that the visuals can be even more expressive because of that.  The way this comic plays about with the lucid experiences that Eileen is going through is fantastic and it does it's very best to express these events with so much visual creativity. There's one notable part of this volume which delves into Rom the Vacuous Spider and I have to give major credit to the creative team for visualising the all-knowing, all-seeing concept tied to it in such a vivid way. There's some really intriguing panels in this volume and I can't take anything away from the comics ability to use the visual components as a means of expressing it's story.

Despite it's gorgeous illustration and presentation I still think this entry in the series is easily flawed. The writers desire to lean into the vague storytelling of the video game doesn't work nearly as well on comic format because there needs to be a more direct means of keeping the narrative going besides abstract hints and implications.  As long as you can interpret what the brilliant visuals are conveying then you will probably get some understanding but it's just not enough to give the reader any proper sense of engagement sadly.