Red Wing #2 – Review

By: Jonathan Hickman (writer), Nick Pitarra (artist) & Rachelle Rosenberg (colors)

The Story: A temporal war in which both father and son are key players is fought at multiple points in time.

What’s Good: We get a lot of Hickman’s big concept stuff as this story takes place in several decidedly different times:  We see the son (“Dom”), in what seems like the era in which the story is anchored, then we see the father marooned in the pre-European Central America hanging out with a bunch of Native Americans and finally we have a jump into a third (and unexpected timeline).

It is this third timeline where the magic in this issue happens.  There is a startling reveal on the final page in this timeline, but that isn’t really the cool thing.  What makes me interested for the next issue is that by playing a little bait-n-switch with the reader’s sense of the timeline, Hickman has really jiggled our expectations.  In a lot of ways, it reminds me of the final reveal in Pax Romana where you think you know what year the final scene takes place in, but couldn’t be more wrong.

The fun for the rest of the series will be to how the puzzle pieces fit together.  How did the father and son come to end up in their “current” positions?  Can we ever truly nail down the whole story when a temporal war is keeping everything in flux?  Surely that Central American diversion for the father will be important, especially with the Native American chief saying that they have no word for “war”.  Hickman is a strong enough storyteller that he should bring this story home strongly.

The Red Wing #1 – Review

By: Jonathan Hickman (writer), Nick Pitarra (artist) and Rachelle Rosenberg (colorist)

The Story: Imagine a war with weapons and soldiers that can travel in time.

Review: I’m a huge fan of Hickman’s creator-owned work.  You won’t find a series that is more of a raw, punch-in-the-face than Nightly News or as mind-bending as Pax Romana or as creepy and layered as Transhuman.  I didn’t love Red Mass for Mars, but it was more that I didn’t love it in comparison to the other series.  Red Mass is still probably a 7/10 story.  I even re-read all four series over the 4th of July holiday to get my mind “warmed up” for the release of Red Wing.

Re-reading was probably a mistake because although Red Wing is a perfectly fine comic, it does pale slightly in comparison to a re-read of those four finished works.  It isn’t as brave as Nightly News and it isn’t as high-concept as Pax Romana, so it is hard to not be a little disappointed.  It is probably a little unfair to judge a new #1 issue versus completed stories where the issue-to-issue story beats fade away.  But, having put myself in that mindset before reading, it was hard escape.  Folks coming at this fresh may view the comic very differently.

But, Hickman does have a very interesting concept: What if time-travel was discovered and it became routine to fight wars by using time travel technology?  How would such a war be waged?  What happens to pilots flying temporal fighter planes that get shot down in the past?  Even though this first issue spent a lot of time laying out the technical ground rules, I remain very confident that Hickman will ace this story in the long run.  I just can’t imagine the brain that has given us Nightly News and Pax Romana and Transhuman failing to make a tasty dinner with these ingredients.  Hickman also gets bonus points for not getting bogged down in the “rules” of time travel: “Be careful what you change in the past or you could wipe us all out of existence.”