Radiant Comics

I’m back from the comic shop this week and I got two new comics plus a hard cover collection:

And now for a review of something I’ve read recently.

“Mystery in Space with Captain Comet” by Jim Starlin, Shane Davis, and Rom Lim

I finally got around to reading all of this series that came out in 2007. I read a couple issues of it back then but didn’t have the whole thing. I already had the first trade paperback so Iwent and bought the second TPB.

This is the most enjoyable Starlin book I’ve read in a long time. I haven’t read a lot of his stuff in recent years being that, though I am a fan of his 1970’s work, I never much liked his Thanos/Infinity-whatever comics. Those are the only comics I can think of him doing in the last two decades but I’m not sure what else he’s done as I’ve lost track of his work.

This book takes place far out in space on a city sized space station. Technically it’s in the DC Universe but it doesn’t has much of a relationship to it. Earth isn’t a place that’s well know this far away. Captain Comet dies and is resurrected in the very first issue. It’s an odd way to begin a story but Comet (he drops the Captain) is happy to have a new lease on life being that he is reborn forty years younger than he was.

There is also a backup story staring “The Weird”. He’s a character Starlin wrote a four issue mini series about back in 1988. It’s more like a parallel story than a backup because the two characters are in the same time and place. I was sure the stories were eventually going to intersect and the did.

The plot is not complicated. Comet dies, is resurrected, more people want to kill him, he tries to find out why, and a religious corporation wants to take over the space station. Themes that Starlin has been using his whole career.

I really liked the pacing of the story. It seemed to move at a Goldilocks speed. Not to fast and not to slow. I thought the various characters were interesting and well developed. I even like Starlin’s musing on the nature of life, death, and resurrection. They added just the right flavor for me. Plus I liked that it wasn’t mainstream DC Universe stuff so Starlin was free to make the space station seem alien.

The art in the book was good. Shane Davis drew most of the story with Starlin himself drawing “The Weird” portion of the book. Ron Lim pitched in to pencil some of the final couple of chapters. I liked Davis’ art better than Lim’s but Lim did a nice job. Overall the storytelling was a cut above the rather dull stuff I find in DC comics these days.

So there you go. I liked this series a lot more than I expected to. It’s collected in two trade paperback editions and the second volume has the original “The Weird” four issue mini in it from 1988 drawn by Bernie Wrightson. That was a good story too. Give it a read if you’re an lapsed Starlin fan like me.