Stinger: The Green Hornet #1 Review

Editor’s Note: While we might normally report on a piece or two of comics news this late in the evening, it is April Fool’s Day, and we don’t believe a single Goddamned thing we read on any news site today. And while I toyed with making up some bullshit story about us being acquired by Marvel Comics or something, I feared too many people would comment simply with, “Good.” So here’s a comic review.

Despite a misspent youth, adolescence, adulthood and middle age reading comic books, I don’t really have a lot of personal history with The Green Hornet. The radio show and the Bruce Lee TV series were before my time, and I missed the attempted comics reboot of the character in 1989 since I was just starting college and therefore needed to cut back on my comic budget to fund a newly-found Boone’s Farm habit. I became mildly interested in the first Green Hornet series from Dynamite Comics back in 2009 until I learned it was being written by Kevin Smith, and therefore there was an even chance that the second issue would be finished and released sometime next November. And then there was the 2011 movie starring Seth Rogan that was so abominably awful I felt ripped off seeing it for free on cable while so drunk I would have been entertained by almost anything airing on TruTV.

So, long story short, I really haven’t had much of a reason to follow The Green Hornet. I, however, have many reasons to follow Mark Waid. So I picked up his first issue of The Green Hornet purely based on Waid’s name, with my only preconception about the character being that Seth Rogan played him in a way that made Adam West look like he was starring in The Dark Knight Returns.

So was the fact that Mark Waid was the writer enough to make me give a damn about The Green Hornet for the first time ever? Well… kinda. There was some pretty good stuff here to be sure, but there were also a few leaps in logic that I didn’t believe, and a little too much time tying the character into Dynamite’s shared pulp universe that was interesting, but distracting. But on the plus side, it featured far fewer fart jokes than I remember from the movie.

We are introduced to Britt Reid in 1941, millionaire publisher of the Chicago Sentinal and grandnephew of The Lone Ranger (no, I am not kidding), by way of voiceover from, well, Britt Reid in 2013, apparently a crotchety old fart who bitches about the Internet and cable television just like every other crotchety old fart who lived through World War II. By the third issue he’ll be speaking wistfully about Sarah Palin and screeching at kids to get off his lawn. But I digress. Anyway, we spend the issue learning that Reid and his valet Kato are pretending to be “supervillains” The Green Hornet and Kato, using their access to everyday criminals and corrupt politicians to feed leads to the Sentinal’s reporters to bring them down via the public prints. While they tackle a mobster and his paid-for Harbor Commissioner, the also-corrupt Governor makes a play in a rival newspaper to paint Reid as a mouthy dilettante in order to sink the Sentinal’s circulation, because God knows stories about boozy rich kids don’t move the papers. But I’m getting off point again. Anyway, one of Reid’s reporters gets kidnapped by the previously-mentioned mobster, the Hornet goes to rescue him, just as the Governor conveniently shows up to accept some graft. Kato gets a nice picture of the Governor, closing down the whole racket just in time for drinks back at the newspaper office.

There is some good stuff in this issue, but frankly, not as much as I would have hoped. I found Kato to be most effective, but that was based on just a couple of scenes. Kato only speaks about ten or fifteen words in the whole book, but the flashback sequence where he and Britt are training and discussing their altar egos, where Kato just destroys a training dummy and says, “I don’t need a name,” was very effective at showing Kato as driven and motivated to battle injustice. Which is a good thing because I have next to no idea why Britt is doing it. Sure, we’re told he’s somewhat influenced by his relation to The Lone Ranger, and he’s pretty vocal that he’s serious about battling injustice in Chicago… but there’s no real indication as to why. Hell, Reid’s financing his battle against crime with his inherited money and his income from the newspaper, but he seems willing to risk it all to keep firing printed shots at powerful people… but there’s no clear indication as to why. All of which made it hard for me to really get behind the character.

Further, there are some plot points here that just seem a little convenient. Beyond the obvious stretch that the Governor just happens to be in the place where Reid’s reporter buddy if being held captive, there’s the fact that a picture of the Governor waving his fist at Reid would cause advertisers to start dropping their accounts with the Sentinal. Why? I’m having trouble seeing the cause-and-effect there, except as a plot device to tell us that there’s a board of directors that Reid must answer to, and to reiterate that Reid’s related to The Lone Ranger – another Dynamite property. We also get a nice mention of The Shadow – yup, Dynamite – which I actually liked, but only up to a point. While I dig that Dynamite is trying to create a shared pulp universe for all their old licensed characters, the multiple references here felt a little forced, and dragged me out of the story a bit.

I realize that all of this might sound like I didn’t like the story. That’s not entirely true; the concept of a superhero pretending to be a villain to attack them via the legitimate press is pretty interesting and different for a standard superhero book, and Kato is intense enough here that I want to see what’s motivating him, but for right now we just have a do-gooder and his buddy fighting crime for no reason. And while I recognize that Waid is under no obligation to explain the backstory and motivation of a character with a 70-plus year history, I can’t be the only one who decided to give The Green Hornet a try for the first time because of Waid’s name. So a little more foundation might have been nice to help ground the character for the rest of us.

Daniel Indro’s art is generally good-looking and solid for the title, with a couple of storytelling problems here and there. His stuff is fine-lined, with an almost sketched look to his facial expressions and some of his backgrounds. The general look gives everything a mildly pulp illustration feel, which is appropriate for a period costumed hero piece, but there are a couple of areas where I needed to stop and figure out just what the hell I was looking at. For example, there’s a sequence where The Green Hornet is faking a murder, and the camera’s placement made it hard to tell exactly how it was being faked (I think it was Kato in a mask, faking being drowned with a scuba tank, but again: hard to tell). There’s another sequence where I was able to figure out that Axford, the reporter, had taken a photo of a couple of goons and ran, but it took me a while because the visuals were just a flash of light and some dude throwing a box (turned out to be a camera) away. Sure, it’s just a couple of moments in a long book, but little things like this make a difference. But on the whole, this was a good-looking comic book.

Okay, so obviously there are some problems with The Green Hornet #1, particularly for readers who aren’t familiar with the character. But the period setting works well enough for fans of old pulp, with some period slang thrown in but not so much it becomes distracting, and some cool old cars and retro tech. And I was interested enough by the tidbits showing Kato’s driven nature to give this one at least one more shot to see where that’s coming from… I just hope that Waid uses that extra chance to tell people like me, who don’t really give much of a hoot in hell about The Green Hornet, about the actual protagonist. I like old pulp. I like Mark Waid. I want to like The Green Hornet… but there’s just not enough here yet for me to say that I actually do.

But hey – at least The Green Hornet isn’t a fat stoner working on a drinking problem. So I guess it’s a start.