Stunt Flying: Rocketeer: Cargo of Doom #1 Review

I had mixed feelings about Rocketeer: Cargo of Doom going into it, because as much as I love the character, it really belonged almost totally to creator Dave Stevens. Sure, I’ve been enjoying the Rocketeer Adventures books over the past few months, but many of those stories took place around the Rocketeer universe, featuring other characters and how the presence of The Rocketeer affected them. These short stories felt like tributes to Stevens’s character and work, allowing the original to stand on its own without new creators jumping right into that sandbox.

Rocketeer: Cargo of Doom, however, is a full-length miniseries focused firmly on The Rocketeer and his friends themselves. This puts the creative team of writer Mark Waid and artist Chris Samnee right onto Stevens’s turf, and when it comes to Dave Stevens, we’re talking about a guy who was such a perfectionist that he only came out with two long form Rocketeer stories between 1982 and 1995. So for a long-time Rocketeer fan, who owns the original movie poster and who still carries his keys on a Rocketeer keyring, a poorly-done Rocketeer story would be a catastrophe; a rotten cash grab on the level of the worst of Before Watchmen, only with an added distasteful element of necrophilia thrown in to boot.

Thankfully, Rocketeer: Cargo of Doom is a generally worthy addition to the Rocketeer canon, that continues Stevens’s own addition of period-appropriate pulp canon to the original aviation-based story, with a healthy dose of flying action, a respect toward the vocation of pilot in the early days of flying, and the most dysfunctional relationship since Judd Winick said, “okay” to Catwoman. Of course, being a period pulp adventure story written after 1982, it also borrows some elements heavily from Raiders of The Lost Ark, but we’ll get to that in a minute.

This Is Not The Greatest Song In The World: Rocketeer Adventures Vol. 2 #1 Review

When I was a working comedian, some inconsiderate dickface sent some True Believers (and if Stan Lee hasn’t sued the Christ out of that dickface’s estate for trademark infringement, then comics’ lawyers are spending too much Goddamned time keeping me from reading new Miracleman stories) onto flying machines to do something unspeakable. And in the face of this tragedy, we working professionals needed to figure out how to be effective in addressing the scenario in a way that didn’t feel disrespectful to the people affected it. What we did was to write material about the fringes of the tragedy. We didn’t write about the guts of it, we wrote about what people were doing in the face of it. We wrote about how people were reacting to it, and how it affected our understanding of American myths and legends.

Dave Stevens, the creator of The Rocketeer, died of leukemia in 2008 after having written and drawn only a very few stories about a character so compelling it spawned a movie – sure, a movie that John Cartered, but what the hell; it’s still more than Wonder Woman got. IDW Comics is now publishing a Rocketeer Adventures series, and they’re doing what we comedians did right after 9/11: they’re telling stories about The Rocketeer by telling stories around The Rocketeer. And those stories are generally pretty Goddamned cool.