3 out of 5

Ah, pulp super heroes – cain’t we get enoughs of ya’?

If they’re written with the same zeal as Gregg Taylor’s Red Panda: no, no we cain’t.

The formula here doesn’t deviate from that Shadow thing: masked avenger (Mr. Red Panda) with a secret playboy identity protecting his city in tandem with his driver / masked sidekick Kit / Flying Squirrel, employing various assistants roundabout to equip / inform him to solve some recent mystery.  Taylor’s banter between Panda and Squirrel, and the casually precise choreography of artist Dean Kotz immediately elevate Panda to the “better than the bunch” echelon.  It helps that there were years prior of radio plays – also, I believe, handled by Taylor – establishing these characters and their world, which means that the short background blurb on the opening page doesn’t come across as trite, but rather, exactly what it is: catch up; it’s not complicated, and we need more time and page space to have fun!

Which we do.  Alas – and this is either a consequence of Taylor taking only a few steps into the comic world, or that this initially appeared via the MonkeyBrain imprint, which, for whatever reason, seems to encourage what I’m about to mention – the ‘mystery’ being solved here is a mess of names and concepts that never quite congeals.  It’s not so bad for the first issue, but it starts getting sticky in issue two, and then the third issue is just too much he-said-she-said to matter, darting about and around Panda’s mix of magic and science to make it all seem like hullabaloo instead of heroics.

I go back to the enjoyment factor – Taylor, to much credit, doesn’t try to weigh us down in these mixed-up specifics – and that Kotz knows how to keep the pages followable, even when the pacing is zipping us from streets to rooftops with nary a beat between.  However, the book admittedly went from “new favorite!” to casual read the further I dug in.  But let’s not underrate that, because I’m still happily digging into to Panda’s next adventures…