Alix #2

Following on from Alix L'Intrepide, Le Sphinx d'Or is more of the same weak and disjointed stuff we got in the first book. However, Alix gets a friend in the form of Enak, an Egyptian adolescent with plenty of street smarts. This episode is just as slapped together feeling as the first one, involving highly anachronistic scientific advancements and characters who are very out of place. We again meet up with Arbaces, a villain whose hatred of Alix is just really misplaced and he is carrying out a strange plot. I think the series might have been better had Arbaces were carrying out some plot on behalf of his patron, Pompey instead of some weird plan involving gunpowder, hundreds of years before that substance was really invented. What I do like is the setting in Alexandria and up the Nile, but we're still years off from when the Alix series gets really good.

I guess as somebody who really loves ancient history and the biography of Caesar, I have to wonder why the siege of Alesia happens in the dead of winter? To the best of anybody's knowledge, it happened in the sweltering days of summer, but Martin renders it like the siege of Bastogne or Stalingrad. It's really immaterial to the plot of the Golden Sphinx, but does add continuity to Alix L'Intrepid. Again, it is clear that this book was initially composed of serial comic strips and suffers a very disjointed feel as a consequence.