The Rocketeer IDW One-Shot // Review
Indie comics pioneer Dave Stevens’s The Rocketeer has been around for about 40 years. At the time, the WWII-era retro hero’s adventures would have been about 40 years old. IDW celebrates the hero with a breezy three-story anthology featuring the work of some really impressive talents. Artist Adam Hughes renders the first of the three stories, which imagines the young hero’s childhood encounter with Amelia Earhart in a tale written by Danny Bilson and Paul De Meo. Then writer Kelvin Mao tells a more traditional tale of crime fighting in a story drawn by Craig Cermak. The issue wraps up with a simple drama by Robert Windom, which is drawn by Jae Lee.
Betty finds a postcard to her boyfriend Cliff from an “Amelia.” Naturally, he will have a bit of difficulty explaining the situation to her...especially as it involves one of the world’s most legendary pilots. Elsewhere, Cliff and Betty are attending a lecture on South America when a simple sneeze finds Cliff donning the helmet and jetpack to deal with a few thieves. There is poetry in a final adventure between the covers as a scuffle with a villain ends in a kiss with Betty.
Bilson and De Meo’s tale is a pretty easy connection to make. Earhart has, in the very recent past, encountered a young Wonder Woman on the comics page. It stands to reason that she’s going to run into nearly every airborne hero who would have been active back then. Mao’s story has a quick and classy action about it that wouldn’t have felt out of place in the Golden Age of comics in which it’s set. The encounter between Rocketeer and another retro ’40s hero is a nice addition. Windom’s final story is a nice little bit of narrative dreaminess that suits the page quite well.
Hughes’s art is phenomenal. One can’t help but wonder what it might have been like with him as the sole artist of the book. His work with depth and distance gives a beautiful sense of aviation that provides the visuals of the first story with a beautiful sense of wonder. Cermak’s work on the second story is respectably enjoyable. There’s a very clean and well-angled sense of action about the page. Lee’s work on the last story feels sketchy and dreamy in its own way...which amplifies the poetry of Windom’s prose.
There’s no question that the Rocketeer could easily land in his own long-running series. The swashbuckling adventures of a guy and a rocket pack could work so well in so many different types of action from the 1940s. Stevens never really had the opportunity to bring the character the kind of long-running adventures that he might have deserved, but it’s nice to see other people take another look at the character a few decades after his big debut back in the early 1980s.
