HALF PAST DANGER

"BITE THE BULLET" | "IN LIKE FLYNN"
"SOMETHING WICKED THIS WAY COMES" | "CURIOUSER AND CURIOUSER!"
"OURS IS BUT TO DO AND DIE" | "KILLING WITH KINDNESS"
Created, Written, and Drawn by Stephen Mooney
Colors by: Stephen Mooney (#1) & Jordie Bellaire (#2 - 6)
Edits by Chris Ryall & Chris Schraff

HALF PAST DANGER opens in 1943 as a group of U.S. Army soldiers patrols a tropical island which they quickly find to be occupied by A) Nazis and B) dinosaurs. The entire unit is wiped out save for its commander, Sergeant Tommy "Irish" Flynn, who manages an escape. The story picks up some time later as Flynn is recruited by British agent Elizabeth Huntington-Moss to join her team in returning to the island to investigate further. The group is rounded out by Captain John Noble of the U.S. Army and Ishikawa Minamoto, a Japanese defector who happens to also be a ninja.

Our heroes reach the island, meet a German scientist named Greta, and come into conflict with the Nazis, who are loading the dinosaurs into a train, and ultimately onto a boat, in order to return them to Germany. But when the group heads aboard the Nazi ship, we learn that one of our heroes is a traitor, and that the dinosaurs are merely a red herring for the Nazis' true goal -- the capture of Captain Noble.

Ultimately the Nazis are defeated and our heroes rescued by the United States, and we're promised that "Half Past Danger Will Return".

Well, I doubt I'll be along for that ride. As noted a couple weeks, back, this was really just an impulse buy for me when I checked out an IDW sale on Comixology. The collected edition's cover promised "dames, dinosaurs, and danger" and while all three are prevalent in the story, there just wasn't enough of any of it to keep my attention. I like the concept in theory -- a dinosaur-infested island discovered by Nazis during World War II is a fantastic idea, and fits with Hitler's interest in the unusual -- and Stephen Mooney's story is fine. HALF PAST DANGER reads, as I'm sure he intended, like a summer popcorn movie with bold action, diabolical villains, and a decent character arc for the protagonist, Flynn.

SPRINGTIME GRAB BAG (IDW RETRO EDITION)

Last Fall, Comixology had a 50% off sale for their full IDW catalog. I'm not often big on digital comics outside of Marvel Unlimited, but I took advantage of this sale to check out a few things I've wanted to read for some time, as well as one series on which I did a spur-of-the-moment splurge. Somehow all of these items wound up being stories set in the past, hence the "retro" aspect of this review series.

Now, for the next four weeks beginning this Friday, I'll take a look at all those items in order of publication, beginning with the ROCKETEER comics of the eighties by Dave Stevens. The Rocketeer is a character I've had interest in for years, based as he is on the adventure serials of the thirties, but for whatever reason I've never actually checked him out. (I've never even seen the movie, despite its being released when I was twelve years old, pretty much the perfect age to get excited about it.)

Following the Rocketeer, we'll spend two weeks looking at Darwyn Cooke's four PARKER graphic novels, based on the character created by Donald E. Westlake and set in the sixties, when the novels were originally published. Much like the Rocketeer situation, I've never actually read anything by Cooke (though JUSTICE LEAGUE: NEW FRONTIER has been on my radar for several years now). Hopefully his adaptations of another writer's work will give me a decent idea of what he was all about.

Lastly is the splurge item -- HALF PAST DANGER, a mini-series by Stephen Mooney. I'd never heard of Mooney, but in stumbling across this series while perusing the IDW catalog, I decided I liked the artwork and I liked that, as with THE ROCKETEER, the series is influenced by adventure serials and is also set in the thirties.

So for the next few weeks we'll be heading back several decades to explore eras of Nazis, hard-boiled gangsters, and high adventure. And, once this is all done, it's entirely probable I'll stick with the retro theme for a few more months as part of this year's "Summer of..." project, so stay tuned.