Rose #3
Story:
Art:

Written by Jeff Smith
Art by Charles Vess
Lettered by Steve Hamaker

Published by Cartoon Books
Price: $5.95

My Verdict: Weak.

The conclusion of the story. Having released the dragon Balsaad, Princess Rose and her two canine companions, Euclid and Cleo, must now seek the beast out and destroy it. Problem is, the dragon is powerful enough to recover from any blow that it's given. The Great Red Dragon has the answer for how Balsaad can be stopped, but the price to be paid for the knowledge might be too much for Rose to bear.

I think it should be mandatory, first of all, that books that take forever to come out--no matter how good they are--should have a little "Our Story So Far..." blurb at the beginning. Because having given the first two books to a Vess fan in my family, I had to wrack my brain in order to remember just what the hell was going on.

With that out of the way, let me just state for the record that this is a helluva way to end the story after having spent $18 before tax to go through it. Although the final battle with Balsaad and the advice the Great Red Dragon (who for some reason, to me, always looks like Marmaduke with pom-poms on his head) gives is clever, there are no consequences at the end of the story for what happens. Somebody glares, somebody else feels bad--that's it. Maybe I'm missing the significance of something, but unless there's a sequel--it's quite a letdown.

This is unfortunate, as--despite feeling somewhat derivative towards the beginning of the run--the book wasn't half-bad. But the ending feels like Smith either ran out of pages to tell his story, or wasn't sure how to end it--or both.