I've been picking up most of the retro re-imagining comcis titles I've been seeing over the last year or so, since I've gotten into comics, nearly all by Dynamite Comics, and mostly 70's and 80's cartoons. These titles jumped out at me at the start because I was a stranger in a strange land, unsure of which titles to pick up at the comic book shop, and relived to see these familiar titles and images. Titles like Space Ghost, Barberella, and The Green Hornet. They looked good and they seemed somehow appropriate, demonstrating a mix of honoring the pulp of the originial titles, but clearly breathing new life into them in a refreshingly not tongue-in-cheek way. It felt maybe like I was both being met on my own level (an older fan, at least passively aware of these franchises, now revisiting the childish wonder in me, and ready to connect with new yet comforting stories of childlike wonder.)
I'd also had some luck with a similar title, reading the excellent Snagglepuss graphic novel from Mark Russell and Mike Feehan, so I suspected I would be taken care of, checking these titles out. Further, Dynamite was doing the new Uncle Scrooge comic, somehting extremely dear to my heart, though publisher couldn't be a limiting factor, as I was loving IDW's Transformers title (though I grew weary of that title, possibly because I was never a huge Transformers kid--it was a bit before my time--or possibly because the Transformers comic was unrelentingly bleak).
In any case, I wasn't particularly surprised to see a Speed Racer comic, and didn't realize for some time this was by Mad Cave Studio, who I've never heard of, but like, I suspect, many of us, I was always at least a little intrigued by the 70's Speed Racer show, and had recently come around on the truly brilliant 2008 film by the Wachowskis.
Well, it turns out it's not a Speed Racer comic (though that's also currently being published), it's just in that universe. It's actually a Racer X comic, and that's just what it needs, in my opinion, to have that spark we saw in the Speed Racer film, as they both bring us to how it all started, and in rapid succession, bring us to now.
