Review by Ian Keogh
Anne Bonny and Mary Read were real life 18th century pirates, and their version in A Man Among Ye are united with runaway daughter of a plantation owner Lady Jane Castor, and Iris, the former slave who accompanies her.
There’s a new artist in Josh George, who has a superficially more attractive style than Craig Cermak in Volume One, but it’s also more generic, with changes made. Previously Read was a believable and resourceful girl who seemed to be in her early teens, but here she’s aged several years and is now as impossibly glamorous as the remaining cast. The upside of the that is the pirates also getting a makeover, and some featured here are genuinely threatening.
An unconvincing matter in the first volume was Calico Jack Rackham apparently willing to betray Bonny to collect the bounty on her, yet it’s the ongoing plot with which the series ends. What’s laid out is that Rackham is a man of pragmatism above all else, and had he remained with the uncompromising Bonny there would have been no future for either of them. The turnabout might just about have worked were it not for Stephanie Phillips sending mixed messages by showing their past so romantically. If intended as an example of the complexities of love, it’s implausible, and as it becomes the focus of the final chapter, it drags the remainder down with it.
The adventure beforehand has all been engaging enough, if perhaps too reliant on last second rescues, but leaves a feeling that A Man Among Ye is a series that never quite reached potential.
