Broken Frontier

Green Hornet Strikes has the potential to be an amazing series.  With the seemingly endless wave of new Green Hornet and Kato titles coming out in the months preceding the release of the movie, Green Hornet Strikes offers a fresher look at the classic character.  This title seems to not only reboot the character for a modern audience, it looks like it also reinvents the Green Hornet character completely, and places the cast in a completely different time period.  It’s too early to tell if this story is connected with the canon of the original, but it does feature staples of the original series, like the gas gun, the Black Beauty, and Kato.

This reboot/sequel (it’s not clear which it is yet), centers around two distinct storylines, which seem to happen at different times.  The first follows an older newspaper man named John Reid who seeks to sell the secret of the Green Hornet.  The other revolves around a young and inexperienced Green Hornet in futuristic gear.  It seems that this may be his first mission, as he is constantly making notes of mistakes that need correcting for future missions.

Both of the storylines had things that made them cool.  John Reid offered class, charm and mysteriousness, while the young Green Hornet offered a “Christian Bale in Batman Begins”-like look at the early days and rookie mistakes of the superhero.  Writer Brett Matthews does a great job of creating intense but fun moods with dialogue, while artist Ariel Padilla excites the audience with dynamic layouts and dramatic poses in the action scenes.  The two make a great team.

There were a few times that the parallel storylines made the story a little hard to follow.  Without indicators like captions to indicate the general time period, or layouts that ran side-by-side, the two stories sometimes blurred into each other and it was hard to tell what was happening, and to whom it was happening.  This was probably done on purpose, to show simultaneous actions and similarities in the lives of the characters, but in the midst of all that action, it just made it hard to maintain a mental image the first time through.

Despite that, the story was still quite exciting.  The new costumes and gadgets look fantastic and the continuing storyline has the potential to redefine the character for new audiences.  I’m definitely willing to give the new edgier redesign a chance, as long as it leaves the main continuity intact.  Matthews and Padilla, don’t let us down!