Books like Poison Elves: The Mulehide Years

Poison Elves is an interesting though flawed hidden gem. I was recommended this series by a good friend who is a big fan of it. As someone who loves Elves and dark fantasy, I felt this would be a perfect series for me to get into. So elated with the idea that I went and bought the entire trade paperback series. This volume consists of Drew Hayes's self-published issues under Mulehide Graphics. Taking into account the fact that Hayes self-published these volumes, I decided to keep my expectations rather low, but the overwhelmingly positive reviews for this series gave me the impression this was some near flawless hidden masterpiece. Unfortunately, I can't say this is so.While I did get many laughs reading this volume, I encountered a number of glaring problems with it. The earlier chapters/issues has this cross-hatching style that makes it difficult to really make out anything. Hayes's art improves throughout the issues but his paneling at some points remain rather confusing. The pacing's a bit all over the place--it's sometimes fine, sometimes too fast but seldom slow. There are also a LOT of typos in the narrative, especially when Hayes decided to tell some parts via walls of text instead of comic panels. Speaking of that, the walls of text sort of threw me off. Later in the volume there's this big "fight" scene between the hero, Lusiphur, and a wizard named Tenth. Instead of actually drawing out the scenes in panels, Hayes instead decides to use novel-style narration and some illustrations. These sort of sections can be rather pace-breaking and his constant POV switching makes it a bit annoying to read, if not downright confusing. I don't mind reading novel-style narrative (as I read more novels than comic books anyway) but I feel they are out-of-place when the sections before are all paneled. Volumes 1-2 are fine and I find them the most enjoyable chapters out of the volume. Volume 3 is a mixed-bag for me since he starts to get lazy and ends up narrating a lot more rather than actually drawing things out in panels. The volume 4 section is the worst; the pacing becomes so rushed that it ends up being very underwhelming to read. I don't know if Hayes did this because of budget constraints or pure laziness, but I do not enjoy the fact that he decided to condense so much into narration blocks and rushed panels.Haye's art, while unique, is fairly inconsistent. He can never seem to decide on a consistent face shape for Lusiphur, making the poor Elf look his age at times (early 20s) to over 40 at other times. It seems he was trying to experiment with his style while working on these issues, so I can sort of let this slide.Aside from the narrative and paneling problems, a HUGE problem is the interview at the end of all the volumes. DO NOT read that until you have read later volumes in the series as it contains MASSIVE spoilers. I don't know what gave Sirius Entertainment the idea to include such a spoiler-laden section at the end of this compilation when many of the things mentioned don't happen until later on in the series! Maybe they intended this to be bought only by hardcore fans and not someone new to the series like me, which is just absolutely ridiculous. As sad as it is for me admit, I cannot rank this volume higher than a 3. Yes I like it, yes I think Hayes had a lot of talent for humor and was very original for his time, but it could have been a lot better fleshed out. I am holding my hopes up that the series improves past this volume.