Captain Victory and the Galactic Rangers #1 (Dynamite)
STORY : Joe Casey
ART : Nathan Fox (pg 1-8,12,13,15-22), Jim Rugg (9-11) and Ulises Farinas (14,15)
Warning: Minor Spoilers ahead
It goes without saying to anyone who is familiar with him, that Joe Casey is a bit of a divisive entity in comics – he is definitely a respected talent, but he has a tendency to really push the envelope and where he thinks comics can go and this both strongly attracts some readers while putting off others.
This latest comic (at least in this 1st issue!) seems to be very much Casey but not quite as potentiallly controversial as some of the stuff he’s done more recently.
Instead, Captain Victory and the Galactic Rangers reads more like a good old fashioned space-based adventure story, albiet with a bit of a twist given that the titular Captain is flash-friend to a crisp within the first couple of pages.
THE REVIEW:
We basically get tossed head-first into a space-battle where my fellow Captain and his trusty inter-galactic crew are under deadly fire from some strange and unexplained enemy and the damage they take results in seemingly shaking Victory loose from his mortal coil – but being a sci-fi adventure, we get a consciousness transfer system coming into play wherein the good Captain is being brought back to life in a new body. Except things proceed to get messier and more explosive in the midst of all this resulting in two clone pods being shot off into space and his crew adrift and struggling to (a) keep the ship in one piece and (b) figure out where their Captain went!
It helps tremendously to make this a better read that they’ve got a nice and insane art-style to the layouts that are somewhat maintained between the mix of artists keeping the difference from jarring the reader too much. The artists do a great job of making the pages look like something that could just as easily be screen-grabs from an animated show or a live-action tale even, as a believer that good stories should transcend mediums, this was a nice feeling. Ulises Farinas’ pages however do stand out in terms of consistency while Fox manages to really get into a grittiness that serves the story well.
THE LAST WORD:
All in all it’s not a bad tale and the reveal at the end lends itself to interesting possibilities. But I didn’t find it either terribly enticing or all that unique aside from some slightly over-whelming but good art – though the potential remains. The choice of showing what happened to the two wayward pods seems too easy or too derivative in a sense, depending on how you look at it, but for now I’m willing to give this a couple of issues before making a judgement.
OVERALL SCORE: 6.9 / 10
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