If anything, Warriors Creed serves to demonstrate that not just anyone can write comics. As a scripter, King proves remarkably tin-eared. Check out this piece of narration from the opening page: "It is said that this island holds many tales of would be conquerors, almost heroes, and forgotten pains. You could say I'm here for a little of all three of these things." I had to reread that rascal several times before it could actually register.

Artist Chris Fuentes doesn't particularly help matters either. He has a shaky handle on anatomy – his characters' necks, in particular, have a propensity for elongating in unnatural ways – while his big-draw action panels are frequently characterized by petrified poses. Fuentes' panel compositions don't always clarify the action, and, combined with King's unsure grasp of storytelling niceties, things can get pretty dicey. When King tries something as basic as a simple flashback illuminating his bland characters' background, for example, he doesn't include enough info in the narration to make it immediately clear when we return to the present. In more confident hands (think the current season of Lost), this type of confusion can be calculatedly entertaining. Here, it just comes across as sloppy.

At one time, this kind of fumbling, half-formed comics work would've been largely confined to amateur-produced fanzines, where young would-be comics writers and artists could have taken their first fumbling steps into creating in front of a small audience of fellow comics geeks, hopefully learning from their mistakes in the process. These days, the existence of web comics and specialty publishing companies makes it disastrously easy for eager newcomers to foist their work on an unsuspecting public. I'm less concerned about what this means for Pastor King's message of Christian manliness than I am any young boys who are given this book in a misguided attempt at introducing 'em to the King James Bible. Let's hope they have some friends with a decent pile of mainstream comics or a shelf full of manga – lest they get turned off graphic storytelling altogether.