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There’s more — quite a bit more, actually - which is odd considering how little story is delivered in any actual page. Priest’s greatest weakness seems to lie in cheesy exposition. There’s a lot of story here and most of it lies in conversations that happen between action and horror sequences. With so little of the actual drama of the story playing out in anything other than expository dialogue, the plot itself seems to take a back seat to the action. As the story progresses, the largely uninspired execution of action sequences (and even some of the drama) approaches a kind of skillful execution. Min-Woo Hyung shows an ability to respectably take the story into contemporary times and then back into the era of the Crusades without making the jump cuts in the narrative feel at all disjointed. The story as a whole, however, never quite coalesces into anything more than a casual science-fantasy horror serial. There’s really not much depth beyond the surface of the story.

The story plays out in 16 volumes of 160-180 pages each. Having its heart firmly planted in cinema, the comic book moves with a remarkably cinematic feel. There’s actually remarkably little text in the 2,000-3,000 pages. And while the story is highly kinetic, moved along by a brilliant sense of action and pacing, the actual action that passes between the pages isn’t terribly inspired. Everything rests quite motionless in each panel. The flow of action doesn’t rip across the page with the kind of intensity it truly deserves.

This is not to say that Min-Woo Hyung’s work is entirely without its visual appeal. One gets a profound sense of depth in the visuals, particularly when the author/artist is making grand, sweeping entrances into sophisticated bits of architecture and the rugged terrain of vast landscapes. The backdrop that the story rests on is beautifully rendered. There’s a certain kind of respectable poetry to individual bits of the story that work quite well in places, but Priest is a remarkably patchwork piece of art considering it was all written and drawn by the same guy over the course of nine years or so. In its worst moments, Priest is a silly and hackneyed action story. In its best moments, there’s a kind of beauty to it, but on the whole, it’s not a very accomplished work of fiction.

The Movie

The film wastes little time in distancing itself from the comic book. In an animated segment done in a style very reminiscent of Min-Woo Hyung’s style in the comic book, the premise is delivered — vampires have been around for as long as humanity has been around. It is the modern era. Vampires have been locked out of vast walled cities. In order to combat the evil, a group of priests were trained to be assassins trained specifically in the art of vampire hunting. This is quite a departure from a story about a cursed priest traveling alone and hunting the undead in the old west.

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