Books like Assassin's Creed: Assassins Vol.1: Trial by Fire

Hunting Witches10 July 2017 - Perth With another comic that I am reviewing you may be wondering why it is that I have said numerous times previously that I'm not a big fan of comics. Well, it has more to do with me wanting to go and check out comic books stores so that I can Yelp about them, and like the guy in the comic book store where I purchased this comic, I really have no need for merchandise meaning that the only thing that I am going to buy when checking out a comic bookstore are comic books. Anyway, as I was browsing this particular comic grabbed my attention so, even though like most comics this was incredibly overpriced (though it seems that book prices have gone through the roof recently, though this probably has more to do with bookshops becoming a dying breed), I thought I might check it out. The thing is that I tend to like stories involving assassins, though it eventually turns out that the story ends up not being all that good. This is particularly the case with movies, though of late I have seen some pretty awesome assassin related movies, including the Assassin's Creed movie (though that was actually a while ago now). I'm sure many of us are aware of the backstory to the Assassin's Creed universe, though I'll be honest and admit that I haven't played any of the games, though that has a lot more to do with not having any time to play games as opposed to not wanting to play them (and even then, when it comes to games, I tend to be rather old school – bring back the Commodore 64, or even the DOS Box). So, the story goes that there are two factions – the Knight's Templar and the Brotherhood and they are locked in an eternal war. Both factions are attempting to obtain artifacts known as Pieces of Eden and they locate them by going back in time, though they don't actually travel physically, nor are they able to have any influence – they are just spectators – instead they go back to an ancestor and then pretty much follow the ancestor around until they locate the piece. Once they have found where the piece is hidden they return to the present day and then go and hunt down the artifact. Trail by Fire appears to be the first in a series of comics and takes us back to the days of the Salem Witch Trials. The story focuses around a woman named Charlotte de Cruz, whose ancestor happens to be one of the Brotherhood. As such, she is approached by the brotherhood in the present day so that they can send her back to the days of the witch trials. From what I gather from the movie it isn't just the Brotherhood that has this technology, the Templars have it as well, and I also get the impression that the Templars are much better financed than the Brotherhood are, who these days (as it appears that they have always done), lurk in the shadows. The story is not what grabbed my attention though, but rather the piece at the end on the witch trials. The story behind Salem is that it was a colony established by the Puritans, and these guys take fundamentalism to the extreme (much like religious fanatics always have done). The thing is that when we hear about witch burnings, we tend to automatically think of Salem, when in reality this was happening all over the world. One thing that struck me is that the victims were predominantly women, and usually independent woman at that. It appears that the trials were more about oppressing women, and using religion as a way of keeping them in their place. From what I gathered from the piece at the end, this aspect of religious zealotry was just another form of oppression masquerading as religious purity – these women never were witches, and it is unlikely that any of them knew the first thing about witchcraft. Even if they did, that still didn't give anybody the right to kill them. I guess the other thing was that life in Salem was particularly hard, and people back then still saw a lot more spiritual forces at play in the world. This was a world where people believed in vampires and ghosts. Sure, the scientific revolution was beginning to take hold, but that was back in the old world – this was the new world, and the people of Salem literally lived on the edge of the unknown. Beyond the town were dark forests and uninhabited lands (that is except for the original inhabitants, but in the eyes of the people of Salem, they didn't count). In a sense there was a fear that their civilisation could easily be overrun by the forces of evil, and one wrong move could bring the wrath of god upon them. The interesting thing is that Christ's Christianity was a religion of freedom, and freedom from fear, yet these puritans, on the edge of the world, had turned this around so that they were once again living in fear.