Pulp Friction #4 – Review

By: Mark Waid (story), J Bone (art), Rom Fajardo (colors)

The Story: Who will save us when the Spirit and Rocketeer are down for the count?  It’s President Franklin Delano Roosevelt!

The Review: After the four months it took to get from #1 to #2, I wasn’t expecting to see #3 for at least another month or so.  So it was with no small amount of surprise that I discovered #4 sitting on the IDW shelf in my comic book shop last week.  That, of course, left me with the question of what to do about #3; I wasn’t all that enthused about hunting down an issue in which I had only a very mild interest anyway.

Eventually, I did what I so often do: compromised.  I did rummage through the back issues for #3 (and, might I add, they had plenty in stock); I did not actually purchase the issue.  Instead, I thumbed through it, got what I needed to know, and discreetly placed it back where I found it.  Well, come on—it’s not as if Pulp Friction boasted such complications in the plot that I needed the issues near at hand for reference.

Pulp Friction #2 – Review

By: Mark Waid (story), Loston Wallace (pencils), Bob Wiacek (inks), Hi-Fi (colors)

The Story: The Spirit on a plane.

The Review: Four months—that’s the amount of time it took to get from the first issue of this (four-issue!) mini to the second.  And that’s only after a month or so seeing the issue solicited for release week after week until my local comic book shop gave up and redacted the title from their weekly newsletter entirely.  I don’t know if this is the consequence of a dual-publisher team-up or what, but it better not be a running pattern.

The problem with shipping delays is, even though they have nothing to do with the story itself, they still affect the story’s impact.  Ordinarily, each issue only has to have enough substance to carry a reader through the next month.  When you have an issue that must now carry four months’ worth of entertainment on its back (and possibly four more—God forbid), you’re only setting it up for failure.  It gets even worse when, as here, the issue isn’t outstanding anyway.

Pulp Friction #1 – Review

By: Mark Waid (story), Paul Smith (art), Jordie Bellaire (colors)

The Story: East Coast mystery man meets West Coast daredevil.

The Review: What is it about pulp, specifically one era of pulp, that keeps readers coming back for more even decades past its prime?  If you ask me, pulp offers baggage-free entertainment: all the action and dramatic flair, without the challenging gray areas.  In a world where each piece of fiction is a different cocktail of increasingly wild combinations, pulp is the whiskey shot of genres: straight, to the point, and just what you needed.

Certainly, there has been no better age for the everyman character.  So many of our heroes nowadays have to be “special” in some way: a mutant, a prodigious intellect, a person touched by the hand of fate—someone who is different from everybody else.  The Spirit and Rocketeer are comparatively ordinary beneath their domino mask and space helmet.  Denny Colt and Cliff Secord aren’t brawny Adonis’ or super-geniuses or gifted with unusual abilities and powers of any kind.  They get by on their guts, a good dose of cleverness, and their values.

Rocketeer: Cargo of Doom #1 – Review

By: Mark Waid (writer), Chris Samnee (art), Jordie Bellaire (colors), Shawn Lee (letters) & Scott Dunbier (editor)

The Story: Cliff Secord has to manage his relationship with Betty and villains both nefarious and common.

Review: This is a splendid comic that does everything you’d want in a first issue.  If IDW can keep the quality of the Rocketeer comics at this high level, they’ll get no complaints about playing around with the late Dave Stevens’ characters.

Mark Waid does a great job of introducing all the characters and showing us what they’re like.  Of special note is how well Waid nails Cliff and Betty.  They come across very much as Peter Parker and Mary Jane: earnest, good, decent, heroic guy who’s a little bumbling and clueless and drop-dead gorgeous girl who ALL the guys in town love but is smitten with her guy even if she’s always slightly annoyed by him.  That’s just about the right dynamic for this relationship and and just as Peter and MJ have intrigued readers for ~40 years, Cliff and Betty are equally enticing.