3 out of 5

Am I a bad person?  Sometimes I just don’t get it.  I’ll turn to the internet for support, thinking, surely, that some other person will agree with me, that Mark Waid is missing the mark on Rocketeer, the story and art just not meshing together well for some reason, the story seeming to jump around to fantastic fantastics like we care or know what’s going on but that it just doesn’t click… but, I dunno.  People are jonesing the last couple years for these Golden / Silver Ageish books, with, yeah, agreed, great artists like Chris Samnee – of the Darwyn Cooke crowd (classic paneling, clean characters) with a bit more Michael Lark (cartoon realism) tossed in – really finishing out the package, but whereas this mesh of classic and modern is working like awesome with the same team on Daredevil, I feel like this suffers as Brubaker’s Catwoman did, where The Rocketeer just doesn’t have enough history to really make it feel real.

I suppose this was the same problem I had with the Rocketeer Adventures series.  Waid had some good bits there because he latched on to the skeleton of this character – the demanding girlfriend, the crackpot science angle – and spun some short and sweet high adventure around it.  The other stories didn’t quite get this blend more often than not, just thinking that kitsch should sell comics.  Other people seemed to agree with me, and thus we get Mark put on a full series.  But in the process of trying to push the zany adventures out to full length, it exposes all of the things that aren’t fleshed out enough about The Rocketeer, who turns out to be a sort of Archie-like character (with a Veronica and Betty mix of girls) with a rocket pack.  I like Archie, and it’s very readable, but doesn’t make a lasting impression on me.  There’s room for popcorn books like that in the world, for sure, but not so much on my shelf nor in my budget.  And while the adventures of superhero Cliff and his gals might actually work, we gotta keep the light sci-fi adventure stuff going, so we have creeps in shadows and dinosaurs and other things, and suddenly it feels like Samnee just can’t keep up with all of it, some of the action totes unclear.

I dunno, I dunno, I dunno.  So many pieces of this work in other places.  The simple fun stuff keeps me buying Atomic Robo, but that book started with a premise and then slowly worked in this sense of history and characters.  The problem with reboots of classics that I don’t remember ever reading is that you can’t rely on the nostalgia to carry it if I ain’t got nothin’ to be nostalgic about.  AND YOU CAN’T TELL ME THAT EVERYONE WAS ALL ABOUT THE ROCKETEER.  So I feel like this slots in with the Archaia and Boom! and etc. trend of buying up properties and playing into people’s “oh snap I’m cool I like the fraggles” and getting good teams to add credibility to the books, but then the runs end about twenty issues in.  Books of the month.  We shall see.