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Preface
Hello all and welcome back to my reviews of the BOOM Studios Power Ranger comics. Last time we took a slight detour with the arrival of the Pink mini-series but now we’re back with the main story in this modern retelling of the stories we loved as children. Children, a lot of us were children when we first saw any iteration of Power Rangers, heck, we grew up on the stuff. When we grow up its easy to peg the stuff we watched as kids to simply be childish and not worth our time anymore. For some reason though, if you’re reading this review, power Rangers has managed to pull you back to its graces and you realized that just because this is for kids it doesn’t mean only kids can enjoy it. To me, that’s the mark of a great franchise.
If I may take another chance to stall in talking about the comic itself let’s also take a look at how this series chooses to tell its story. There’s a term in the comic world called, “Writing for the Trade” where it becomes increasingly clear that the writer will, instead of making each individual issue a stand-alone story, that many issues will create and extended tale. I’m going to make the prediction that this story, if we factor in how much story has been given in each issue up to this point, will probably end or at least have most of the story points closed within two more issues after this one. That would put it at seven issues for a trade paperback to contain. It’s a bit large but not unheard of for a trade to contain. I don’t know if we’ll get a completely new story after this or it will take the left over points from this one, but I am interested to find out. Now onto the story.
The Story
We open our story in the ports of Japan, presumably Tokyo where we can clearly see that the Mechanized Godzilla built to protect Japan from the OG Monster has gone amok, wrecking havoc and mayhem on the unsuspecting people of…. Oh wait, I’m so sorry I was reading my notes from Godzilla: Tokyo S.O.S. Forgive me, let me get my real notes.
Ahem, we truly start with Scorpina, having just last issue taken control of the Dragonzord and is attacking Angel Grove. To accomplish this she’s using that weird golden dragon dagger given by Rita and the rangers go out to stop her in their zords. I like this start as it thrusts us right into the action but not without giving us a few answers to the mystery of how Scorpina can accomplish this feat. You don’t need a lot of exposition, just the basics that can help a reader truck along and they can figure the rest out themselves. It always pains me when media treats its viewers like idiots who need their hands held but this issue doesn’t.
Probably the highlight of this book is that we get to see all of the individual zords throwing down and it is both gorgeous and amazing to watch. Add that to the pros of having the medium change from tv show to comic. The real reason that we really only had the Tyrannozord fight the most out of all the other core five zords was for budgetary reasons. It’s simply easy to have the Tyranno or the main Megazord duke it out with the monsters instead of having all the zords fight all the time separately. Not a problem here as for a comic the only limits are those of your imagination.
It was a hard fought battle, especially with Rita throwing in a shark monster that looks eerily familiar to me, and it took the brash actions of Tommy to get it down, but they managed to stop the senseless chaos and even capture Scorpina. I must praise the pacing and tension in this sequence. It really felt like at any moment the situation could take a bad turn for the rangers and they may not be able to handle it. On an intellectual level we can reason that the rangers would most likely prevail, a great story can make you temporarily forget that.
Now its time for character interactions and conflict! Yay! I can’t tell you how much I love the rangers arguing for issues in a row! Okay, sarcasm is a bit harder when you’re just typing. In all seriousness while I am still a bit iffy on Zack’s characterization so far I do at least believe that conflict between Jason and Tommy would lead down this path. It’s what happens when you have two Alpha personalities together, a fight for dominance is bound to happen. What’s interesting and what makes this argument to work so well is that both sides have a point. Tommy is right in that he has been treated differently despite being a ranger like the others and Jason is right in that, in Tommy’s state, he could possibly be a liability.
Let’s not forget another stand out moment, it seems like Tommy has finally shut off the 24.7 Rita radio station and has blocked her out for good. I do hope so as Tommy really does need a break and some positive things happening in his life. Plus when he finally gets with Kim, and we all know it will happen, it’d be awkward to have Rita be in on whatever they do when their alone. You know what I’m saying.
It turns out at the end of this issue that Rita’s gamble isn’t over yet, and the rangers may have unintentionally helped her out. The broken dragon dagger of Scorpina’s activates causing a portal to appear and a new monster, one we’ve never seen before, wrecks the Command Center and the rangers are all caught off guard. Now that’s a way to end an issue guys.
The Technical Aspects
It’s cover time! In this one we have a quite frankly badass image of the rangers all jumping into the mouth of a strange beast to take it out with their weapons. Out of context with the rest of the comic book and seeing this image on a rack, it does do well to catch one’s eye and get them to be interested in picking up this comic for a look, which is what all covers should do. Continuing that theme of the colors evoking a sunset and the warm shading of the other issue’s covers one can easily, based on what they’ve red so far, recognize it as being part of the same
Now while I just got finished praising this cover, I’m going to have to immediately back peddle and take some points off of it. Why you may ask? Well even though it successfully pulled off all the things well, we have to remember one little thing in judging this page; context. Context is utterly important when it comes to any kind of storytelling. It’s what turns a series of images or scenes that may seem to have no relation to each other have a sort of flow to them. Context can completely change the mood or meaning of a scene based on what that context is.
Not to belabor the point here but if you were someone just looking at this on a rack with no prior knowledge of this series plot this cover would have you believe that the rangers fighting this monstrosity would be the main focus of the issue, which it isn’t. This is actually spoiling the cliffhanger at the end by making you completely aware of it at the start. This was also a problem with the last cover that I stupidly forgot to mention in the review for issue three but I won’t make that mistake again here. A better fit for a cover for this book would have been the individual zords slugging it out with the Dragonzord as that it the big action piece of the issue. Overall I would label this cover as perfectly average when we input all of the factors both for and against it.
To talk about the rest of the art Hendry Prasetya continues to do a marvelous job and I don’t know if I would enjoy the story the same way I do if he wasn’t on board for this project. I could go on about why he’s so brilliant but it would become a bit redundant after a while so I will simply go with my short praise here and hope for his talents to continue to improve as it has been doing so far.
Dear Zordon in the Great Beyond
*Obligatory Heisenberg reference. *
But seriously, are you and Alpha okay after that explosion?
Also, who do you have for insurance for your base for all the times it gets blown up? My money’s on Geico but I guess I could just be wrong on that because this Motor Trade Industry: Buying & Selling Trends is really one of the very best that I´ve seen lately…