The Mighty Crusaders #6 – Review

By: Eric S. Trautmann & Brandon Jerwa (writers), Julian Lopez (breakdowns), Carlos Rodriguez (penciller), John Lucas (inker), John Kalisz (colorist)

The Story: The Mighty Crusaders enter the forbidden safe into a volatile dimension, all in an effort to track down the Shield’s father and retrieve a fatal piece of alien technology.  With the warring factions of aliens closing in, it may be impossible for all the Crusaders to escape alive.

The Review: There were some doubts over the decision to bring the Mighty Crusaders (formerly the properties of Red Circle Comics) into DC’s fold.  Reviving relatively unknown characters into the midst of a whole universe of icons was by itself a difficult challenge.  Even harder was trying to convince readers these characters deserved ongoing titles while more popular characters had none.  Ultimately, those titles never gained the audience they needed to survive, and folded.

DC’s latest attempt to sell the Red Circle heroes teams them up into the government-backed Mighty Crusaders.  You can say this miniseries acts as a test run to check if these characters fare any better as a group than individually.  And if their futures will be determined by this venture, then it’s likely you won’t see them again soon.  From the first issue to this last one, the whole series has been generic, at best.

It’s not hard to see why.  Government superhero teams abound in the DCU, whether in the uber-patriotic Freedom Fighters or the questionable Suicide Squad—and these are just the more famous ones.  The Crusaders need some kind of identity or at least a mission statement to separate them from the other guys, and they don’t achieve even that.  This mini focuses on their attempts to retrieve an artifact essential to the plans of those who threaten the US government—which is nearly the exact same premise of the story over in Freedom Fighters.

Eric S. Trautmann and Brandon Jerwa also have the problem of trying to give every member of the Crusaders a distinctive personality and background, but except for the Shield, the Web, the Hangman, and Inferno (who all had their own, albeit short-lived, titles), you never get a sense of who they are or what they’re fighting for.  In fact, if you haven’t read those titles, you probably won’t get a strong sense of even those guys.  You could take put any hero in their places, and the issue will read about the same.  Ten Crusaders (plus their supporting cast) and a conflict involving several factions of enemies—I mean, you do the math.  It’d be very tough to make heads or tails of any of these in only six issues.

Then again, really powerful stories have been told in even fewer issues, so that’s really no excuse.  Trautmann and Jerwa makes tough work even tougher by relying way too much on rambling dialogue that does nothing to build up any of the characters or move the plot anywhere with a good payoff.  At least in this issue he has the luxury of sticking to one setting; in previous issues, he leaps from one place to another before readers can get their bearings.

And for all the explaining the characters do—and boy, they do pages worth of it—few of the story threads weave together in a satisfying way.  Some get abandoned (like Inferno and his, shall I say, questionable nature), some pop up out of nowhere with no previous context (War Eagle’s fellow experimentees), but mostly they’re forced to link together almost randomly.

Carlos Rodriguez is clearly talented.  His pencils have great depth (although they distort in tight panels with lots of characters—which is pretty frequently) and his sense of design, especially in the alternate dimension, shows a lot of creativity.  Some snafus occur: in one panel, the Shield erases his mask; in the very next panel, it’s back on.  John Lucas’ inks and John Kalisz’s colors do everything to enhance the already decent line-work.  The art does its best to inject energy into the issue, but the story itself is too riddled with problems to benefit.  In any case, the art works fine, but just doesn’t seem like anything special—much like the Mighty Crusaders themselves.

Conclusion: It’s really too bad the miniseries has turned out to be pretty much a dud, since the one-shot released before the first issue had a lot of strong qualities and potential.  In the end, The Mighty Crusaders offers a very lukewarm argument on why they deserve to exist alongside the other great DC heroes.  The tag at the end of the issue, left by the series’ editor, isn’t a good sign either: “The Red Circle is closed—for now!”  I wouldn’t wait up nights for their second coming, if I were you.

Grade: C-

Some Musings: – And the award for Best Finish of Someone Else’s Sentence goes to: “I can’t be sure if I’m sensing the poor madman himself…”  “…or if you’re simply picking up the horrible dark energy that wrote itself into his bloodstream during his long, bloody imprisonment?”

– This morning, the Fox set out to beat up some smugglers.  Now he’s fighting extraterrestrial invaders alongside a completely different government’s heroes in a psychedelic, possibly inescapable universe.  He’s a martial artist with a staff.  What exactly went wrong with his day?

– Minhquan Nguyen