Author: Mark Millar
Publisher: Image Comics
Rating: WORTHY!
Illustrated by Goran Parlov
Colors Ive Svorcina
Letters Marko Sunjic
DISCLOSURE: Unlike the majority of reviews in this blog, I've neither bought this book nor borrowed it from the library. This is a "galley" copy ebook, supplied by Net Galley. I'm not receiving (nor will I expect to receive or accept) remuneration for this review. The chance to read a new book is often enough reward aplenty!
This graphic novel feels like a sequel, but I don't know if there was an actual previous volume or if it's just written that way - suggestive of a previous life which was not actually published. Either way I sure as heck isn't hell haven't read it. It's written and illustrated very much like a comic from the fifties, complete with bulbous, needle-nosed rocket ships and goldfish bowl space helmets, so you have to take everything with a pinch of sodium chloride.
I liked that this story started out differently. Yeah, it's a traditionally-illustrated traditional comic with traditionally-objectified women, but that's only a part of it. The story begins with a aging Air-Force Captain Duke McQueen, his glory days behind him Now he's gray-haired and has lost his wife to cancer.
He lives alone, his sons and daughter getting on with their own lives and not having much time for him. All he has is memories of his wife and haunting visions of his past life as an adventurer and hero - which no one here on Earth believes. His story of flying his jet through a wormhole and landing on Tantalus, a planet technologically advanced way beyond Earth, and saving the planet are the delusional ramblings of a man who's launch-vehicle doesn't exactly go all the way into orbit as far as his fellow human-beings are concerned. Maybe he half disbelieves it himself, until a kid shows up in a space-craft from that self-same planet asking for his help - again!
The wormhole through which Duke returned closed-up. Another one wasn't expected for many thousands of years, which is why Duke left - he had to get back to "his" girl. Now the Tantalans have developed technology to create their own wormholes, but Tantalus has been invaded by hostile aliens from a nearby world. The Tantalans have been at peace for forty years and evidently forgotten how to fight (yeah, right!), and of course, Duke McQueen is the only person who can save them!
So yeah, complete flaccid plot, but it's that kind of a 1950's style story, reminiscent of the 1950's sci-fi B pictures, where you have to go with the flow or reject it. I liked it enough, despite the alien kid with the manga hair, to go with it. Despite being sixty-two years old and a smoker, Duke puts on his super-hero suit with the buccaneer boots and goes once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more, or close the wall up with our alien dead!
The bad guy, in true fifties tradition, has horns sticking out either side of his headdress, and he has a goatee and pointed shoulders on his long cloak - and he has a henchman! If you stick your tongue firmly in your cheek as the writer evidently did, and if you don't mind a 'pit of doom' stolen from 300 (which in turn stole it from Star Wars), and you're willing to allow for a cartoon-ish level of invulnerability and success on the part of our hero, and you like your heroes barrel-chested, bull-necked, and cleft-of-chin, then this is a worthy romp. I liked it!
