Pacific Rim: Tales From Year Zero

Title: Pacific Rim: Tales From Year Zero
Publisher: Legendary Comics
Date: 2013
Writer Travis Beacham
Penciler: Sean Chen, Yvel Guichet, Pericles Junior, Chris Batista, Geoff Shaw
Inker: Mark McKenna, Steven Bird, Pericles Junior, Matt Banning
Colorist: Guy Major, Tom Chu, Dom Regan
Letterer: Patrick Brosseau
Cover: Alex Ross
Editor: Greg Tumbarello, Bob Shreck, Guillermo del Toro

This is a prequel to the film Pacific Rim. It does a great job of expanding on the backgrounds of the characters, particularly focusing on Marshal Stacker Pentecost.

We get to meet Pentecost's sister, a RAF fighter pilot on training in the US on K-Day, the date of the first kaiju attack on San Francisco. And we get to meet her wingmate, Tamsin Sevier, who goes on to become Pentecost's jaeger co-pilot.

The book covers Tendo Choi's experiences in San Francisco on K-Day, and introduces the woman who developed the two-pilot drift system and went on to become co-pilot of the first jaeger to see combat.

For fans of the film, this is a treasure trove of background, and it's got some great character development and a lot of tragedy and triumph. It is deeply sad in places, and the right kind of fun in others.

I also loved the diversity of the cast of characters. Many writers would have felt like they had gender diversity covered with one female pilot (Pentecost's sister, Luna). It was awesome to see Tamsin introduced as well, and then given a powerful role in the story.

There were a couple of inconsistencies with the story presented in the film, most notably the fact that nuclear weapons were used on kaiju in the early years, which appears to be a contradiction with the background as presented in the film. This may have been an issue of final editing to the film.

I do feel like you need to have seen the film to get the most out of this, but for fans of Pacific Rim, this is a great collection of backstory that adds dimension to several key characters.

Rating: 8/10

The Strain #1

Special $1 introductory issue released a few weeks ago.

Title: The Strain
Issue: 1
Date: 2011
Publisher: Dark Horse Comics
Writer: Guillermo Del Toro, Chuck Hogan, David Lapham
Artist: Mike Huddleston
Letterer: Clem Robins
Colorist: Dan Jackson
Editor: Jim Gibbons, Sierra Hahn

Comic adaptation of the first novel of a trilogy by film director Guillermo Del Toro and writer Chuck Hogan. David Lapham adapts the story to script.

The opening flashback is standard vampire fare, with a young boy in Romania in 1927 hearing a local legend from his grandmother.

Flash forward to the present and there's a plane quarantined on the tarmac at JFK with all communication cut off and a bioterrorism response team en route. CDC doctor Ephraim Goodweather finds all but three passengers dead in an incident that apparently lasted only six minutes.

All of this is a reasonable prologue for what seems to be a full-scale vampire apocalypse. Like the investigators themselves, I'm left trying to figure out how things transpired on the plane, and it makes for a pretty engaging mystery.

Doctor Goodweather comes off as rather generic as main characters go. The other main character, Abraham Setrakian, seems a bit more interesting, but the present-time version of him just gets a tease in the last two pages.

This issue did a nice job of setting the scene, but other than the opening flashback, there the story felt like it was all setup and no depth. The arrival by plane was a nice variant on the events of Dracula, but the really interesting aspects that will distinguish this from other vampire stories are not yet apparent.

Rating: 6/10