The following review originally appeared at Patrick Daniel O'Neil's Mild Mannered Reporter Blog and was retrieved from the Wayback Blog.
Tuesday, September 13, 2005
A Recommendation
Whenever the conversation among comics fans turns (as it invariably does) to the question of how to make comics a mass entertainment medium again, I am asked to point out a currently published title that I think could have the same appeal to the general public as popular films such as the Indiana Jones series, Ocean's Eleven, and the like.
My choice is also invariable: Rob Hanes Adventures by Randy Reynaldo, published by Reynaldo's WCG Comics.
The eponymous character is a globe-trotting agent for Justice International, a security-cum-detective agency headquartered in New York City. He is frequently partnered by an older agent named Abner McKenna...and most adventures involve a beautiful girl or two. Like Indiana Jones, Rob is human, a little headstrong, fallible, but ultimately on the side of the angels...even when it seems he may be bucking his own employers and/or the US government.
Recent stories have revealed the secret of Rob's father's past ("The Glowworm Identity," Rob Hanes Adventures #5), a search for a missing scientist ("The Hunt for Octavius Jebru," RHA #6), and an encounter with an antiquities collector in Africa ("The Last Explorer," RHA #8). That last brought back into the series two of Reynaldo's most interesting characters--the woman who might be Rob's "one true love," Caroline Cromwell, and her unredeemable husband, Anthony.
Reynaldo is an unabashed fan of the adventure comic strips of the 1930s and '40s, most especially Roy Crane's Captain Easy and Buz Sawyer and Milton Caniff's Terry and the Pirates. It shows in the style of story he tells and in the crisp black-and-white art he uses to illustrate them. There are still times when Reynaldo bites off more than he can chew artistically and something doesn't quite work, but he's growing constantly as both a writer and an artist.
I'm also a big fan of those strips and I'm pleased to see someone in modern comics successfully emulating them. These are the kinds of stories that non-comics fans enjoy in other media and there's no reason the comics form of them shouldn't be equally as popular. They just have to be pointed out to them.
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