The Rocketeer: In the Den of Thieves #1 // Review
Bettie’s been cast as the pirate queen in a new picture. The good news is that her flyboy boyfriend, Cliff, has pulled himself away from a rather dangerous piece of tech for long enough to get serious about being with her. The bad news is that this is the 1940s, and the Nazis have developed a version of the tech that’s going to put Cliff in the path of danger in The Rocketeer: In the Den of Thieves #1. Writer Stephen Mooney opens up a whole new story for the venerable indie comics retro hero with artist and colorist David Messina.
Cliff can’t get the rocket pack out of his mind. His engineer Peevy has his hands full just maintaining the plane Cliff flies. Repairing the damage to advanced experimental tech like the rocket pack is going to require a whole different level of attention that Peevy simply doesn’t have the time for. And anyway...Cliff really needs to focus on his relationship with Bettie. A nice, relaxing evening with a rising Hollywood actress sounds dreamy. Peevy is going to be in a much worse place when the Nazis in the rocket packs show up to collect him for his expertise.
Mooney establishes a few major players in the story relatively early on. It’s a simple conflict. Peevy just wants to work. The Nazis just want him to work for them. Cliff is falling in love with Bettie. The danger is going to pull him away from her into a dangerous place. The tension is firmly established in the first issue of the new series. There isn’t a whole lot of intricacy in the characterization of any of the characters, but there doesn’t really need to be. It’s a fun opening to a fast-paced action drama.
Messina works the visuals with a clarity and simplicity that matches Mooney’s script. The action is captured from a variety of different interesting angles, which should become really important if Mooney is going to have Cliff up against an army of Nazi Rocketeers. The vision of a flying squadron of swastika-branded rocket soldiers could have hit the page with a BIT more menace, but there’s a lot more time for that now that the initial premise of the series has been delivered in the first issue.
The kinetics of the action and the warmth of the drama are more than engaging enough to launch the series forward into its second issue. It’s been a great deal of fun so far...and it almost seems to more or less be a story that picks up right at the end of Dave Stevens’ original series, which ends up feeling like a smooth transition for anyone who might have only been familiar with Cliff, Bettie, and Peevy from Stevens’s original work. Mooney’s style feels similar enough to Stevens’s that everything seems to fit together remarkably well between Den of Thieves and a series that had originally appeared on the racks of comic shops decades ago.
