Dynamite lets me down again. I had rather high hopes for this team up of the Lone Ranger and the Green Hornet, two classic heroes bonded together by their creators. Fran Striker created the Lone Ranger and Tonto, and George Trendle owned him as he proved to be a very successful western radio star. Later this same duo tried to update the concept of a white masked man assisted by an ethnic partner and so created the Green Hornet and Kato. Putting them together in a single adventure requires no small amount of manipulation, particularly when you decide to include a veritable rogues gallery of villains both real and fictional as well as a cavalcade of classic heroes of the pulps, radio and early TV among actual historical figures. Sometimes a soup can be too thick to enjoy.
.jpg)
I give Michael Uslan high marks for trying. His name is what got me to try out this Dynamite volume. My history with Dynamite is spotty at best. They are fantastic as coming up with loads of pretty and dynamic covers for intriguing concepts with heroes with great pedigrees, but they are equally weak at producing well produced graphic stories. Giovanno Timpano has a heavy lift with the barrage of characters he was tasked to draw and sadly he fell short. Too many faces are the same and only costumes can help to clear things up. Uslan's script is so dense with homages that the forward momentum of the story is sacrificed. This is a mash up of his favorite things and it is fun to see heroes like the Lone Ranger, the Green Hornet, Tonto, Kato, blended with real historical folks like Jesse Owens, Eliot Ness, and President Teddy Roosevelt, among many, many others, but there's just too many of these nods. I will admit seeing the Green Hornet ride a white stallion while the Lone Ranger drove the Black Beauty got a chuckle out of me.
This is a great idea for a comic. I just wish these were better comics. Dynamite strikes again. Below are the covers for this limited run. These covers are pretty good.
(John Cassaday and June Chung)
(Jan Duursema and Stan Mandrake)
(Jan Duursema and Stan Mandrake)
(Jan Duursema and Stan Mandrake)
More Green Hornet action tomorrow. Don't turn that dial.
Rip Off
These are the types of team ups that you used to dream about as a kid but the reality is that they didn't always work - for me it was any DC hero with the Hulk or Silver Surfer some of these were good some bland . Both Green Hornet and the Lone Ranger were characters that were never a big part of my younger years ( although i was aware of the Lone Ranger less so the Hornet) so I missed this. Dynamite did/do some good comics but they really do push the multiple covers concept to a ridiculous level .
ReplyDeleteI think their business model is to sell fifty alternate covers to one compulsive collector rather than sell one comic to fifty different readers. Alternate covers are fun when we're talking about a few, but Dynamite exploits the concept to ludicrous degree.
DeleteI agree on the Hulk team-up notion. He's largely just a force that has to be contended with. After Superman and Spider-Man they put Batman up against Old Greenskin. Maybe the Hulk in his Joe Fixit persona would be fun to see in Gotham.
One reason this sounds like a great idea is that I was told by one pro-- I'll probably think of his name down the line-- that the Ranger's original motif was the one the Hornet made more famous: that of pretending to be an owlhoot to ferret out other owlhoots. I've only read two collections of Ranger pulp-stories, and neither featured that schtick, but it sounds plausible. What may've happened is that once the Ranger became super-popular, the producers may have decided that he needed to be a "white knight" who didn't go around messing with criminals, and someone had the idea to transfer the schtick to the Hornet. I never followed the Ranger's radio serial either, so the earliest version I've seen in the 1938 serial, which introduces the idea of the hero having survived a massacre of Rangers.
ReplyDeleteRe Uslan: I did nominate his Shadow-Avenger story for DC as one of my favorite crossovers, just because the author did a really nice job of playing the two heroes off one another. Uslan squeezed in a lot of the secondary characters there, but they didn't impede the story-- and I particularly liked the implication that The Avenger was hip to the Shadow's bag of tricks, though the Avenger never specifically said so.
The writer is what got my attention here or I'd have likely let it go. I was a bit disappointed. There were definite beats the team wanted to showcase, even if the logic of the story was a bit bungled along the way.
DeleteThe Lone Ranger and The Green Hornet both appeared in TV Tornado. LR also appeared in various UK comics at different times.
ReplyDeleteExcellent.
Delete