5 out of 5

I was a little hesitant to dig into ‘Planet Racers.’  Lawson and Laird have their fledgling sci-fi interests that poked their way into Turtles via space battles, and then there’s Lawson’s obsession with motorcycles that promised detailed coverage of bikes real or imagined for the story.  And though Laird has been responsible for some madly gifted concepts (beyond his part in the genesis of the four green ninja mutants…), his dramatics can be a bit heavy-handed at times, undercutting potential awesomeness with an element of camp that’s not always rightfully placed.  So I suppose I was expecting a somewhat detail cluttered story about bikes with dashes of 80s movie flair (as in ‘I’m the best racer,’ and ‘I’ll win this girl’s heart.’)  Maybe I wasn’t wrong, but maybe the duo took those pieces and found the perfect, perfect, perfect outlet for them.  I’ve never read Peter’s writing so paced and developed – he had good opportunity with scoped writing with TMNT vol. 4, but he admitted to writing that organically as it went along and it sort of showed at points – and the combo of Pete’s inks over Lawson’s pencils – well, that’s maybe not a new look, but Jim feels inspired in his creations of tons of alien races and the bike designs and the WORLD designs.  Every page, every panel just looks goddamn fantastic and plays to both artist’s strengths.  Perhaps there’s something about having experience in the biz and then getting to design your title from the ground up.

What’s most telling is that there are some hiccups here and yet I didn’t mind them at all.  Some plot pieces don’t get enough room (Meth’s family developments for one) and despite my praises of the art, when the action becomes frantic it can be a bit difficult to sift through the black and white to figure out who’s supposed to be where, especially during racing sequences where bikes can either defy gravity or the ‘camera’ angle switches to something more cinematic.  And the ending is 100% bluster, not quite a deus ex machina but like a race to see how condensed the team can cap off the whole thing… 800-900 pages of story suddenly resolved in 2.  But these missteps are folded in in a way that doesn’t make the experience unenjoyable – Pete / Jim don’t wax on and on about any particular part of the story, so showing us what’s what before moving on might’ve been key in keeping the reading compelling and not sinking into those feared over-dramatics.  The clutter in the action isn’t required to be sorted out to get the gist, and one could say that the chaos adds to the energy… so puzzling over what you’re looking at might be of interest to those of us who love Lawson’s art, but those pauses, again, never got in the way of my enjoying the tale.  And the same goes for the ending.  While I would’ve appreciated more than one panel giving us hints of where each trail leads (there’s an epilogue-ish page near the end that does only that – one panel per several aspects of the story), I have to admit that the avoidance of a big wrap-up keeps the tale light and, yeah, makes me want to read it again… because nothing in the experience is ruined by the ending.  This doesn’t happen often, of course, and you can re-read Watchmen and love it still, but sometimes you race (womp womp) to the end of a story to get the conclusion and then you have to wait a long time to re-experience things.  Here everything comes to something of a logical end, with enough openness to not fully close the cover, and allows us to keep focus on the thrills we had whilst reading.

And it’s about bikes and winning the girl.  Hyuck.

IN THE FUTURE… Godman Falcon is a corporate sponsored ‘planet racer,’ a massive event wherein two riders (a navigator and a driver) drive huge bikes around huge planet-sprawling tracks.  After a nasty accident puts Godman into the public eye of disgrace, he’s let loose from his sponsor and ends up partnering up with Methania Fitts, who belong to a race of beings who treasure ‘balance’ and live to race, but not for profit or fame.  And thus she’s as spurned by her world as Falcon is, at that point, by his once-fans, and she needs a driver to replace the drug-addicted Jahr, who ends up coming back in various fashions to fuss things up.  Add about fifty thousand pounds of awesome imagination to this, with tons of thought (or so it seemed to me) put into the structure of the races, the structure of the bikes, the plethora of alien races participating, the Massey-Basheene world from which Methania comes, The Big Downtime – 800 years where Earth was caught in stasis, one of a few mysteries seeded into the book – a self-aware mega-computer named Janus, and some nifty corporate espionage being investigated by badass robot Lone Wolf and its ‘owner?’ the awesomely odd Mr. Zoneatore.  Book 1 bridges the gap from Godman as racing god to humbled man, properly and believably smoothing out his character, Book 2 develops Methania into a real person and not just the hard-edged female, and Book 3 brings our two characters together for an exciting collusion of races and, hey, why not, some world / race threatening superpowers.

We do get tons of world building, and tons of shots of the bike and discussions of pieces and components, it’s just all part of the story and not just for show.  From the first few pages – showing Godman’s career changing accident – I realized I was hooked.  The creators found the perfect blend of action, fresh sci-fi story and human elements to make it readable, then amped up the fun with wicked art (you have to dig Lawson’s blocky style, though; I’ll admit that it’s an acquired taste) and cool concepts that felt grounded, not just buzzwords tossed in to make it sound futuristic.

In other words, it’s one of the most fun reading experiences I’ve had, especially for something so dense.  The massive amount of story just flies by, and it’s cool that there was an arc planned out, but I wonder if I wouldn’t have been hooked for the long run if it had been an ongoing.

I picked these up from Mirage directly, as they’re selling the three book package for pretty cheap.  If you read comics, have sampled Jim’s art and find it palatable, and watch any kind of science fiction series on TV, I’d think this would be just as much fun for you.  Also, if you’re reading this, you’re probably me, so you know I’m telling the truth.  YOU FUCKING BASTARD GIVE ME BACK MY BABY