I had only planned to pick up one of DC’s summer mini-series (Villains United), but I had a moment of weakness on Wednesday and grabbed the first issue of Rann-Thanagar War. Andy Diggle and Pascal Ferry are to blame for sparking my interest in Rann and its residents, and I guess I wasn’t quite ready to leave them behind with the last issue of the Adam Strange mini.
(Spoilers ahead.)
R-TW opens with the war already underway. Adopted Rannian Adam Strange has traveled to Earth to recruit Hawkman and Hawkgirl to help him establish peace between the populations of the two planets. The Rannians and surviving Thanagarians are currently occupying Rann. Thanagar was destroyed by the unexpected appearance of Rann in its solar system. Rann popped into dangerous proximity to Thanagar because of the machinations of a rogue Thanagarian, a military officer who was secretly loyal to a nihilistic cult. In other words, it wasn’t Rann’s fault, and Rann’s citizens did their best to rescue as many Thanagarians as they could before their planet was destroyed.
Given the circumstances, mutual suspicion, hostility, and ingratitude are only natural. Adam’s hope was that the Hawks (whose current relationship to Thanagar is rather tenuous after a number of continuity shifts, but heck, they’ve got the wings) would be able to help smooth things over before the situation deteriorated too far. But in the hours Adam spends soliciting their aid, hostilities break out, and Rann becomes a battle ground between the two groups.
After an odd opening sequence of the Hawks battling a phoenix (perhaps a conscious wink at a classic cosmos-in-peril saga from Marvel), the exposition comes thick and heavy. Adam describes the background (summarizing his recent mini-series) and the subsequent cultural and emotional fallout (a refugee crisis, machinations of a variety of aggressive galactic empires, increased cult activity). I would have preferred to see these developments rather than hear about them. Writer Dave Gibbons does a solid job summarizing them, and penciller Ivan Reis works hard to give the flashback panels some drama, but it still seems under-dramatized given the scale and complexity of events.
Adam and the Hawks arrive too late and immediately try and get a handle on the conflict. Along the way is a short interlude with Thanagarian peacekeeper Thal, who operated for a time on Earth as Hawkwoman, though that’s never explained in the text. There’s also an interlude with Green Lanterns Kilowog and Kyle Rayner talking about the wonders of space in some seriously over-written dialogue:
Kilowog: Orders clear, Kyle?
Kyle: As brightest day, Kilowog – as brightest day.
Ow. These pages invoked another cosmic epic for me, specifically the quasi-religious pomposity of the Star Wars movies. Read through the sequence substituting “Jedi” for “Lantern” or “padawan” for “poozer,” and the flow isn’t affected at all.
The Guardians, handlers of the Green Lanterns, send Kyle off to handle an unrelated emergency. They alert Kyle to the Rann-Thanagar situation but instruct him to keep out of it. It’s consistent with the Guardians’ arbitrary standards of galactic intervention, and the order is obviously thrown in to be summarily ignored by their agent.
But awkward chatter and predictability aren’t the main problems with R-TW. What distracts me most is that the warring forces are pretty much irrelevant to the story. All of the focus is on outsiders. That’s natural enough, as Adam, the Hawks, and the Lanterns are the marquee characters here. But since the populations at war are pretty much background scenery, there’s no immediacy to the conflict. If you care at all, it’s because you’re familiar with their place in DC universe, not because of anything on the page here.
The conflict itself doesn’t have much weight either, no matter how carefully it’s been exposited. It’s been cooked up in a microwave, a misunderstanding resulting from the spiteful improvisations of one character, and she died in another title. There’s none of the ancient conflict of, say, Marvel’s Krees and Skrulls. It’s a hostile response to a tragedy that occurred entirely without malice on either side. There’s no political or cultural component to it; it’s just bad luck and bad temper conspiring to put two populations at odds.
It is gorgeous to look at. Ivan Reis really has a handle on this kind of material, at least the high-energy moments. Adam bursts into the frame a lot, and it never loses its kick. The wide-screen moments – the evacuation of Thanagar, war on Rann – are very effective. The emotions on display are extreme, and Reis usually handles them well, though he does err on the overwrought side at points. Colors by John Kalisz are effectively used to establish the shifting settings, though they can get a bit heavy.
But it’s called Rann-Thanagar War, and the war itself doesn’t make very much sense. That’s a problem, and the book is a lot less interesting than it could have been as a result.