The Sword



The third Comic Book series created by Jonathan and Joshua Luna at Image Comics, The Sword is a modern-day fantasy series following the saga of Dara Brighton, a wheelchair-bound art student whose life is changed forever when one evening, three mysterious strangers with Elemental Powers enter her family's house demanding that her father, whom they call "Demetrios", return their sword. The trio ransacks the house and tries to torture the sword's location out of her baffled father, killing her mother and sister before accidentally killing him. The trio is about to kill Dara and call it a day when the ceiling collapses, knocking her through the floor. Rather than bother to kill the crippled girl, Dara is Left for Dead beneath the burning house.

Miraculously, Dara happens to land right next to an antique sword stuck in the ground. Grabbing it heals her injuries, restores the use of her legs, and grants her superhuman abilities. Clearly this is the sword her family was killed over.

At her family's funeral, Dara meets Justin, one of her father's students, whose fondest memories of her father involve the stories he'd tell in class; stories about Demetrios, a ~4000 year old hero who uses his mystical sword to protect humanity from Knossos, Zakros, and Malia, a trio of godlike elemental-powered siblings.

After Dara uses the sword to dispatch some mooks sent to kidnap her from the funeral, revealing her powers in the process, she goes on the run with her best friend Julie, and Justin, determined to use Justin's knowledge of her father's stories to track down and kill her family's murderers. All the while, they have to dodge the nationwide manhunt and mass media craze that spring up once footage of Dara's superpowered exploits become widespread. Throughout her quest, flashbacks provide glimpses into Dara's life before the sword and her father's secret past as Demetrios.

This series provides examples of:

 * Accidental Public Confession: Malia succumbs to Type 1.
 * Achilles Heel: the titular sword is the only thing that can harm the antagonists.
 * A God Am I
 * Arbitrary Skepticism: Knossos calls his ~4,000 year old wind-controlling sister on this when she expresses doubt about the existence of the all-seeing "one true god" who's supposedly their father.
 * Artistic License Physics: falls through the Earth's crust and sinks to the solid core, where gravity is impossibly strong. Gravity actually lessens as you travel towards the core; briefly, gravity is roughly that which you'd experience if you were only affected by the portion of the earth between you and the center (gravity inside a uniform hollow shell is zero; here's the math). Additionally, the density of a human being is less than the density of rock, especially at those pressures; an indestructible humanoid would simply float in the magma rather than sinking to the core.
 * Bad Boss: Knossos. He calls his drug cartel's five top earners to a meeting because one of them has done exceptionally well lately. After he praises the subordinate's accomplishments, he buries him alive for not clearing his actions with Knossos first.
 * Batman Gambit:.
 * Be Careful What You Wish For: "you want your sword, Zakros...? Here it is." If the demigods hadn't killed Dara's family in search of the sword, she would never have found it and used it against them.
 * Brother Sister Incest:
 * Buried Alive: Knossos does this to one of his henchmen.
 * Car Fu: Zakros throws a car at Dara
 * Clean Cut-- Dara's been known to cut through up to three people in a single swing.
 * Closer to Earth-- Malia manages to portray herself as the least evil sibling, but as her Unreliable Voiceover of her backstory shows, she's just the most manipulative.
 * Complete Monster: Knossos, Malia, and Zakros. They lose all sympathy when they torture Dara's family to death and cause multiple innocent people's deaths.
 * Dating Catwoman: Demetrios had an on-and-off relationship with Malia over the millennia.
 * Death By Origin Story: the families of Demetrios and Dara.
 * Death Faked for You: When Dara surrenders to the authorities, a mysterious agency fakes a fatal car accident so it can move Dara to a secret government facility.
 * Determinator: Dara. Her flashbacks go some way to explaining how she developed her Heroic Willpower, but it's still impressive how hard she fights and how much pain she takes through the course of her quest.
 * Disappeared Dad: The demigod siblings have never actually met their father, the alleged One True God.
 * Dodge the Bullet: Dara can move fast enough to deflect bullets up to a point.
 * Dysfunctional Family: Knossos, Zakros, Malia, and Phaistos. Dara's family is the exact opposite.
 * Fate Worse Than Death:
 * Location Theme Naming all of the villains are named after ancient Minoan cities.
 * Elemental Powers: each of the demigod siblings commands one of the four Greek elements:
 * Knossos controls earth.
 * Zakros controls water, including ice.
 * Malia controls air, which in addition to Flight, apparently also gives her lightning powers.
 * Phaistos controlled fire.
 * Fountain of Youth: Holding the sword has been shown to de-age people. Not college-age Dara or anyone else near her age, though, since Immortality Begins At Twenty.
 * Gangsta Style: one of the fake cops trying to kidnap Dara shoots a guy this way. Forgiveable, since it's essentially a point-blank shot.
 * Good Thing You Can Heal: Dara racks up an impressive collection of injuries during the course of the story.
 * Gorn: Not only do the brutal fight scenes exploit the Healing Factors of Dara and her opponents; they also showcase some of the creative and gruesome things one can do to the human body with Elemental Powers, Super Strength, and an Absurdly Sharp Blade.
 * Grievous Harm With a Body: Zakros uses his water-controlling ability to toss Innocent Bystanders at Dara. He can also weaponize water extracted from people's bodies, e.g. at one point impaling through the stomach with a spear made out of  own blood.
 * Hero With Bad Publicity: Dara is the prime suspect in her family's murder, and though she makes sure to Never Hurt an Innocent, people generally see her as a dangerous psycho.
 * Humans Are Bastards: Knossos and Zakros's view of humans.
 * Immortal Procreation Clause: the demigods can't procreate. Demetrios, obviously, could.
 * Impersonating an Officer: In an attempt to kidnap Dara from her own family's funeral, two of the mooks dress as cops to lure her away without suspicion.
 * In a Single Bound: Dara and the demigods can all do this.
 * Kick the Dog: What purpose could the aforementioned Buried Alive scene have served other than to show how much of a stone cold bastard Knossos is?
 * Kleptomaniac Hero: Averted. Despite the urging of her companions and the fact that as fugitives, they genuinely need supplies, Dara isn't willing to steal food, clothes, or transport, and it's not because she's afraid of drawing attention to herself.
 * Minor Injury Overreaction: since the demigod siblings are used to being Nigh Invulnerable, getting cut by the sword tends to freak them out.
 * Moral Event Horizon: Malia
 * Mundane Utility: Knossos's Dishing Out Dirt powers have afforded him a lot of this. In his life, he's been responsible for building many of the world's ancient temples, he's forged black market diamonds and created weapons for terrorists, and in the present, he runs a massive drug cartel with his ability to create extremely pure meth.
 * The Napoleon: Phaistos.
 * Never Found the Body: Phaistos.
 * Nigh Invulnerability: Knossos, Malia, Zakros, and Phaistos. They can't even harm each other.
 * No Ontological Inertia: injuries healed by the sword eventually return after one has spent enough time out of contact with it.
 * Not So Different: Zakros makes a comparison between humans and gods, pointing out that humans are just as prone to murdering, abusing, and enslaving others as he and his siblings are. Dara later pulls one of these on Malia after the latter's Accidental Public Confession shows how susceptible she is to human emotion.
 * Not What It Looks Like: Dara to a pair of detectives, when they find her standing over the corpses of the kidnappers she just killed holding a bloody sword.
 * Oh Crap: The look of shock on the faces of Knossos and Malia when they each see the news report on.
 * Overly Long Name: Julie Seosoudavannavong knows the shit has hit the fan when the news stations have all gotten her name right.
 * Posthumous Character: Dara's family, for the most part.
 * Really Seven Hundred Years Old
 * Roaring Rampage of Revenge: The focus of the plot.
 * Screw the Rules I Have Supernatural Powers: Zakros' rationale for -- the laws of mortals don't apply to them.
 * Self Deprecation: Justin frequently goes out of his way to remark on his own cowardice and Non Action Guy nature.
 * Take Over the World: the demigods' ultimate desire.
 * The Masquerade: The demigods would like nothing more than to reveal their powers to the mortals and rule them as gods, but they keep them a secret, because if they don't, the wielder of the sword will hunt them down. Likewise, Demetrios kept his past a secret so the demigods wouldn't be able to get the drop on him and take the sword.
 * The Load: Justin and Julie are both Muggles, but Justin stands out as the whinier, more cowardly of the two. Julie tags along as moral support, but Justin's stated reason for going along is that in exchange for screwing up his life, Dara has to protect him.
 * The Only One Allowed to Defeat You: This is the reason why, when one of Knossos' mooks gets the sword and attacks him, a powerless Dara risks her life getting the sword back rather than let the mook finish the job.
 * Throwing Your Sword Always Works: twice. First,  Later, Dara uses this to
 * Torture Always Works: ...er, not when you go overboard on the Electric Torture and end up killing the guy. An attempt to torture Dara doesn't work either, because she's just that badass.
 * Unreliable Voiceover: Malia, when addressing the media.
 * Villain With Good Publicity: Malia manages this for awhile by telling the media a revisionist version of her past that makes it seem like her brothers were the evil ones and she just wants to save humanity from a power-mad Dara.
 * Walk On Water: Dara's Super Speed allows her to run across water.
 * What Measure Is a Non Super: Zakros compares mortals to animals; Knossos says their lives amount to no more than grains of sand; Malia doesn't have a metaphor, but she clearly shares her brothers' disregard for humanity.
 * With Great Power Comes Great Insanity: This is what Malia tries to convince the public-- that the sword is an Artifact of Doom that turned Dara and her father into psychopaths.
 * You Know Too Much: for this reason, the government was going to kill Dara after learning what they can from her about the sword; Zakros uses this as an excuse to kill a prostitute after he uses his powers to stop the wine she throws in his face.