2 out of 5

It’s not bad, but the parts that are bad are pretty noteworthy.  And it’s got Paul Gulacy on art, so… acquired taste.

The Rook is a Warren Publishing late 70s pulpy comic guy, a time traveler who fights monsters, his time machine shaped like the titular chess piece.  His origin story, full of grandfather parodoxy awesomeness, is pulp gold, and this 2015 version leaves us in a good place for some zippy adventures going forward.  But the setup is rather turgid.

Starting us in the middle of a story and dropping character names and made up lingo is a bold move; it’s tough to tell if this front-loading was purposeful bluster, though, or Grant trying to stuff as much history in there so he’d have room for his own stories – which I’ll assume to be a refreshed version of our lead (time paradoxes, remember) starting out on his own monster-bashin’ adventures.  Unfortunately, due to some very messy framing, neither one of those feels like what’s going on: it ends up just feeling like sloppy, tossed-together writing.  The framing of which I speak makes odd choices with which characters are speaking in/off panel, and the action is so compressed that conversations unclearly occur before or after a punch is thrown.  Combined with a complete lack of transitions between scenes, the rush of the first few pages gives way to something that quickly feels like a chore to piece together.

The Rook is a great concept, and it’s very possible that, having cleaned the slate, future issues will fulfill the pulp promise.  Unfortunately, the first issue has too many art and script hiccups to attract a new-to-The-Rook reader like m’self, and I imagine the novelty of the character’s return will similarly get lost behind the background exposition dump Grant provides.