CREDIT: Dark Horse
Rating: 3/5 – Reviving Warren’s 1970s Time Traveling Hero.
By ComicSpectrum senior reviewer Shawn Hoklas.
I’m a big fan of Warren’s Creepy and Eerie magazines and have amassed almost the entire run of each as I attempt to read all of them all in order. Around issue forty of Eerie, many of the issues started to contain reoccurring characters like Dax the Warrior, Hunter and the Rook. I’m not yet to issue eighty-two where the Rook makes his first appearance, but after appearing in Eerie for two and a half years, he got a magazine of his own that ran for fourteen issues before moving back to Eerie for a few more appearances before vanishing from the comics scene for many years. Now Dark Horse has revived the popular character with the tagline proclaiming him “A Time-Traveling, Gunslinging Monster Fighter!”
Artist Paul Gulacy draws the entirety of this first issue and if you’re a fan of Gulacy’s work, you won’t be disappointed here. He has a slightly exaggerated style, especially with the eyes, but it’s all consistent. His strongest pencils occur right at the beginning as the hero Restin Dane is being pursued by a group of strange villains in the year 1813. Since the Rook is all about time travel, he jumps forward in time to our present and unfortunately the pencils, although still solid, are not as interesting as they are when he’s drawing a different time period. Thankfully the issue jumps time once again at the end and we get the more interesting designs back.
The reason for Restin jumping into the future is quickly revealed, but the way he finds who he’s looking for is awfully convenient. Writer Steven Grant tells a mostly enjoyable tale, but it does have its slow points and was weak towards the middle. The end left me with some promising potential, but it was not enough to bring me back for issue number two. I’ll be skipping these in single issues and wait for the first trade to be released. My excitement for reading more about the Rook will have to come from older issue of Eerie…for now.
Reviewed by: Shawn Hoklas
(shawn@comicspectrum.com)
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