A vote for Ming is a vote for Humanity!
Creative Staff:
Story: Jeff Parker, Jesse Hamm
Art: Jesse Hamm
Colors: Grace Allison
Letterer: Simon Bowland
What They Say:
It’s going bad. REAL bad. Quantum breaches, shifting continents, hordes of Beast-Men on the loose. But whenever all hope seems lost, MANDRAKE THE MAGICIAN always has an ace up his sleeve…
Content: (please note that content portions of a review may contain spoilers):
Kings Cross has been a good bit of fun, shifting gears just a bit in terms of style and tone from the previous miniseries but moving the larger storylines forward and all the character material. It’s certainly made me a lot more interested in the property as a whole. Parker and Hamm are definitely connecting well here with what they’re doing in story and art to make it feel alive and, dare I say, fun, in a way that a lot of books struggle with. Admittedly, some of what we get here is padding things out a bit as the core group begins to see things, but these are always fun moments of getting into their heads and understanding them on different levels.
Ming’s plans to deal with conquering the Earth through fear and intimidation all while doing it with a smile of sorts is fully underway. His initial piece in order to convince the populace to give in and force their leaders to submit has him dropping a virus warhead on Los Angeles that ends up turning people into Beast Men – instantly. It’s something that could be done in a horrifying way to be sure, and it’s not played for humor here strictly, but it has that lightness to it that combined with the horror of the moment that’s unsettling. And it’s no surprise that a threat like this would cause so many to roll over so quickly and accede control of the country to Ming. Parker and Hamm use some specific dialogue here that makes me wince for its realism in a way, especially in how it changes your view of Ming just a bit.
The bulk of the book focuses on our core group though as they try to get closer to stopping Ming, who has set into motion plans to stop them through Allura and her deviousness. This comes in the form of a hallucinogen induced moment where they all end up freaking out after Jungle Jim is taken down and experiencing alternate realities, from Valiant going after Mandrake thinking he’s Morgan Le Fey or Dale envisioning herself as Ming with the facial hair. Jen deals with killing someone in this and Flash has to struggle with Dale presenting him a vision of victory that doesn’t connect. There’s some solid dialogue to it and skewed view of events that offers their own explorations to be done in the future to expand the characters, but it does kind of pad things out a touch. It works, however, and it puts them into a fun position of being mocked without realizing it before their final capture.
In Summary:
While I enjoyed the previous Kings Quest series a lot I’m definitely digging Kings Cross. This is due to the style of both the writing and the art but also that it’s building upon what came before but not being beholden to the style of it. There’s such a sense of fun even as things get bleaker and bleaker for our group that you can definitely enjoy it even while finding the potential end result of Ming winning to be horrifying. There’s a lot of good character material here and some really amusing silliness along the way that’s all done through some sharp writing and beautifully expressive and dynamic artwork, particularly with the color style applied to it. This is more fun than it should be.
Grade: B+
Age Rating: 13+
Released By: Dynamite Entertainment
Release Date: February 1st, 2017
MSRP: $3.99
