Dan Dare / The Stranded / Ramayan 3392AD Reloaded

This is a 2008 Free Comic Book Day promo that I picked up at this year's FCBD.

Title: Dan Dare / The Stranded / Ramayan 3392AD Reloaded
Date: 2008
Publisher: Virgin Comics
Writer: Garth Ennis, Mike Carey, Shamik Dasgupta
Art: Gary Erskine, Siddharth Kotian, Jeevan Kang
Inker: Jyotsna V. Domse
Colorist: Parasuraman A., Anand Balusamy, N.S. Sathish Kumar
Letterer: Rakesh B. Mahadik, Sudhir B. Pisal, B.S. Ravi Kiran
Cover: Bryan Talbot, Marc Silvestri
Editor: Charlie Beckerman, Stuart Moore, Ron Marz
Dan Dare Created By: Frank Hampson
Ramayan 3392AD Reloaded Created By: Deepak Chopra, Shekhar Kapur

Flip book, plus an extra story in the middle.

Dan Dare arrives with a crew of marines on a colony world where a series of grizzly killings has taken place. The monster responsible conveniently shows up about two minutes after Dare sets foot on the ground. Unfortunately for our heroes, this beast isn't alone. The plot appears to be Aliens with a much less interesting adversary. Still, the pacing was good, and there was enough intrigue going on to keep things interesting.

Flip over the book and you get The Stranded, which appears to be about superbeings secretly living among us. Some of them are fully aware of who they are and are equipped with an array of super-high technology, while others are "sleepers" with no knowledge of their true nature. The opening bit focuses on a pair of human characters, and I'm assuming that at least one is a sleeper, but there's actually very little plot that occurs. They're just established as the bookish guy and the athletic and aggressive girl who are engaged. The action then abruptly moves to a woman of the other group (the ones who are aware of what's going on). She's chatting with a former mentor, now reanimated in a rat body. They establish that someone is killing sleepers, but are interrupted by a team of bad guys and it turns into a running fight for the remainder of the story. The best aspect of this was the alien/futuristic technology, which had a great look to it. Story and characters came off as generic.

In the middle of the book is Ramayan 3392AD Reloaded, one of a series of titles from Virgin comics that (loosely) adapts Hindu mythology. This features a pretty standard gladiatorial combat scenario with a rather non-standard opponent. We only get a couple of pages here, but it looked like an interesting change of flavor from some of the more western-based fantasy.

Rating: 6.5/10