On this week’s edition of The Goggler Pull List we review and recommend Matt Fraction’s Adventureman and the crossover you never knew you needed, Star Trek/Green Lantern.
Here we go.
Adventureman (Matt Fraction, Terry Dodson, and Rachel Dodson)
It is difficult for me to describe the love I have for these kinds of stories. These Golden Age narratives with their over-the-top dramatics, kitschy dialogue, and ridiculous plot lines, where heroes were our last, best hope, and every crisis was an apocalyptic one. These tales of daring and derring-do, of pure unadulterated escapism, may represent a bygone era of storytelling, but they have never lost their appeal. At least not for me.
I opened up Matt Fraction’s Adventureman, and within five pages, I was all in. All in!
Now Adventureman isn’t really the story of Adventureman. In fact, the triple-sized first issue (God, it’s gloriously thick!) serves as a sort of conclusion to his story. The comic, which opens with a rollicking action adventure in which Adventureman and his crew need to take down Baroness Bizarre, The Auomaterror, and the Metamage, quickly and seamlessly segues into the story of Claire, a single mother, and her son Tommy, who are apparently reading about their exploits in the pages of an old novel. (Or are they?)
There are two parallel arcs in this comic book and both of them are beautifully constructed. The pulp escapades of Adventureman are wonderfully old fashioned. Fraction’s joy in penning this story is infectious. It seeps into his writing and jumps off the page. So much so that it carries through even when we are pulled out of it into the humdrum of Claire’s life in present day. The banter between mother and son is so pure. The interactions with her extended family is an absolute delight.
How does the life of a single mother and her zany family tie into the fantastical exploits of a globe-trotting superhero team? We know that both these worlds will eventually come together and the way Fraction bridges that divide makes for some truly nuanced storytelling.
Both Dodson and Dodson are spectacular. Every panel of theirs made me grin from ear to ear. The facial expressions. The power poses. The costumes. There is a quirk and a smirk on every page. And I found such pleasure in poring over their images.
Adventureman is a comic that takes the black and white drama and danger of one genre and uses it to frame an incredibly nuanced take on another. Ultimately, this is a book that’s about the power of stories and the impact and influence they have on our lives. The language here is beautiful. The art and colours are textured. This is everything that comics should be.
Star Trek/Green Lantern ( Mike Johnson and Angel Hernandez)
Crossovers (the idea, not the comic) tend to get a bad rap. They come off as a marketing decision brought forth by marketing people to make their marketing jobs easier. And it rarely works, except maybe to make the aformentioned marketing jobs a little bit easier. The general idea of a crossover is to put this famous thing together with an altogether different famous thing in the hopes that it would somehow, magically, double the fame of both things.
The 2015 release of Star Trek/Green Lantern: Spectrum War feels a lot like one of those cash grab crossovers. This is, after all, two space themed intellectual properties crossing over from one universe to the other in a seemingly random and slightly forced way.
In this limited comic series, the Green Lanterns (and the obvious main characters from the other colour spectrum) get transported to J.J. Abrams’ Kelvinverse Star Trek and meet up with Captain James T. Kirk and the rest of the gang of the U.S.S. Enterprise. There they find that the main Star Trek players have all been found by the power rings and have started to use them to fight their battles.
Over the course of six issues, Hal Jordan and Kirk have to fight off the Klingons (yellow power ring), the Gorn (red power ring), and the Romulan Empire (orange power ring), before finally defeating Nekron by combining all the power rings (and giving it to Spock).
Star Trek/Green Lantern: Spectrum War may sound like a little bit of a cash cow crossover but it isn’t really that. This is a lot closer to My Little Pony/Transformers: Friendship in Disguise – although on the face of it, not quite as ridiculous. Reading this felt a lot more like a fun thought exercise.
Star Trek/Green Lantern: Spectrum War doesn’t really push either property forward, but in its own six issue world, this did just about enough to be a fun enough read. If either group of characters mean anything to you, this series is a low stakes look at what would happen if they were to ever meet. And if you liked it, there’s always the six issue follow up Star Trek/Green Lantern: Strange New Worlds to get stuck into.
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