The Red Wing #4

Written by Jonathan Hickman
Art by Nick Pitarra

Now this was a cool mini-series.  Jonathan Hickman excels at taking gigantic, complex ideas, and playing around with them in his comics, sometimes crafting equally gigantic, complex storylines (most of his Marvel work falls into that category), although sometimes he instead delivers a tightly focused little series, like he has with The Red Wing.

In this futuristic comic, the world is being attacked by a mysterious force that comes from the future.  Their goal is to strip different eras of time bare of all resources, and so the good guys have created fighter vessels that can move through time as well as space.  Picture a cross between Time Bandits and Battlestar Galactica, and you start to understand the background here.

At the same time, as with many a good science fiction story, there is a family tied to the centre of things.  Dom's father was a TAC pilot who was lost when Dom was a small child.  This spurred him to become a pilot himself, and the hero of the series.  As it turns out, his father wasn't lost, and instead hung out with some ancient Aztec or Inca for a while, before becoming a prisoner of the leader of the enemy forces.  Dom, meanwhile in the future, has a hard time becoming the pilot he wants to be, and keeps turning to his General for support.

This issue finishes the story of the father, and reveals a little more about their family, in a very Star Wars way.  It's a great issue for action, and the emotional scenes are handled nicely.  I don't know that I fully follow all of the future stuff - time travel and paradoxes make my head hurt, but I did appreciate the manner in which Hickman told his story, and I admire its scope.  This book is a good companion to Hickman's superior Pax Romana, which is about a group of people moving back in time to guide human development.

I want to close this review by commenting on how bummed out I was to learn this week that Hickman's one-shot, Feel Better Now, which he is drawing and which was supposed to come out this month, has been cancelled and will be solicited later as an original graphic novel.  I was looking forward to seeing Hickman draw something again.

The Red Wing #3

Written by Jonathan Hickman
Art by Nick Pitarra

I'm going to admit up front to being totally left behind by the comic book time travel pseudo-science that permeates this comic, and yet I still find this to be one of the most compelling and entertaining books on the stands this week.

In this issue, the bad guys (do we know their name?) attack the gigantic satellite that our heroes live in, while the father of one of our heroes has a conversation with the enemies at another point in time.

So, if I don't understand everything that's happening on a macro level, why am I so enamored with this book?  Largely because, since I was a small child, I've loved space battles.  Were Star Wars set entirely in X-Wings and the Millennium Falcon, I would have loved it more.  As much as I enjoyed Battlestar Galactica, it needed more Viper-based stories.  Here, The Red Wing satisfies with some truly great spaceship scenes, while also providing all the character work and actual plot that such stories require.

This book looks terrific, and Hickman makes some very head-scratching ideas palatable and dramatic.  Great stuff.

The Red Wing #2

Written by Jonathan Hickman
Art by Nick Pitarra

Now this is what I've been looking for.  The Red Wing has cool space ships that remind me of Battlestar Galactica, nice character development, interesting ideas and settings, and a twist that actually surprised me.  Once again, by working on a creator-owned book, Jonathan Hickman demonstrates why he's one of the best writers in comics.

Our two new recruits, Dom and Val, are working their up through the ranks of whatever the military organization they joined last issue is called.  They both have their own TAC fighters, although Dom kind of sucks at flying his.  The reason for this is that he is having a difficult time adjusting from a linear thinking style, that seriously hinders him in battles that flow through time as well as space.

We also get to see Dom's father, who was stranded somewhere in South America in the period before European exploration, as he interacts with a local chieftain of an Aztec tribe (I assume based on the images shown).

Matching Hickman's peerless writing is Pitarra's terrific art.  He's equally comfortable drawing ancient times as he is designing the futuristic look of the vehicles that the two forces fly.  I'm completely drawn into this comic; I just wish it was longer than four issues.

The Red Wing #1

Written by Jonathan Hickman
Art by Nick Pitarra

I'm always happy to see the creators I have a lot of esteem for achieve commercial success.  They deserve it, even though in the comics industry, commercial success usually means abandoning creator-owned work in the pursuit of work-for-hire for one of the Big Two. That's why, when a formerly 'independent' writer or artist returns to creator-owned comics, it can be pretty exciting.

Jonathan Hickman, who both wrote and draw the amazing series The Nightly News and Pax Romana, and wrote Transhuman and Red Mass For Mars before joinging Marvel and becoming one of its 'Architects', has returned to Image with The Red Wing.  And it's terrific.

The title refers to a fighter squadron used to fight in a war that is spreading throughout all of time.  The TAC (Temporal Attack Craft) fighter is able to jump through time, and one skirmish we watch moves through a number of different eras before the pilots are lost.  After that we are introduced to Valin Redd and Dominic Dorne, the sons of the first pilots we met.  They are cadets, hoping to fly the Mark II TACs in the same war.  Also, we are introduced to the concept that it is possible for a downed pilot to survive.

As with all of Hickman's independent work, the high concept is everything in this comic.  He's put a lot of thought into the science fiction, but is also interested in exploring how people live and interact with the technology.

Pitarra's art in this book is very nice.  I don't know who has had more say in the development of the general design of the space craft or other technological wonders that we see.  Hickman has a strong design background, and his fingerprints are all over the look and feel of the book (there are a couple of blank splash pages), but I also feel that Pitarra, with whom I am unfamiliar, is no slouch himself.  I hope that the scheduling of this book doesn't hit some of the same snags that Red Mass and Pax Romana suffered, because I am very much looking forward to reading more of this.