The recently deceased Darwyn Cooke will be remembered for many things. Though many will look towards his work on projects such as The Spirit or Justice League: New Frontier, fans of his work will definitely want to consider checking out this new series. Cooke did the character designs and has helped to reintroduce the action series of Hanna-Barbera to a new generation.
Unless the reader is a fan of older cartoons they will probably more likely recognize characters from parody shows like Space Ghost: Coast to Coast, Harvey Birdman: Attorney at Law, and Venture Brothers (which often featured references to some of these old characters). There are many of these who haven’t been used in action in a long time, The Herculoids themselves haven’t been featured in a comic in over 10 years. They were long overdue to find a way back to fighting against the forces of evil
The story really explains a lot in a short amount of time. The main adversary of the series, the Entity, a being who wants to destroy everything was defeated by the Space Force, a galactic peace keeping force. Now the evil Dr. Zin is working to resurrect this creature and it’s up to the different heroes to come together to stop it. The book doesn’t take baby steps with action as many members of the Space Force and Tundro, the alien rhinoceros of the Herculoids seems to be dead in the first issue. Top marks to writer Jeff Parker for not being afraid to show a little violence in this series.
The art is great, Evan “Doc” Shaner is able to use Cooke’s designs to really showcases the characters in great detail. The action pages are incredibly intricate and help to tell the story by showcasing just how much chaos the Entity is causing. The use portals to other words helps to foreshadow all the different characters which will hopefully introduced in future issues.
When this series was announced it looked to be one of the better of the new line of books based on classic Hanna-Barbera characters and if done successfully would help to reintroduce a lot of characters to a new group of comic book fans. Luckily it appears as if they have succeeded. Congratulations to Mr. Parker, Mr. Shaner, and the late Mr. Cooke for creating an action series which will appeal not only to fans of old cartoons but will bring in others who will be able to appreciate the greatness of some of these long forgotten animated heroes.
