The Red Wing

Now that’s he’s an established creator at Marvel, Jonathan Hickman is seeking to leverage his increased profile towards new creator-owned projects over at Image.  It’s a noble endeavor and something I support wholeheartedly.  This is the first of them and it’s very much in the vein of his previous work — “Pax Romana” specifically.  Where that series involved Catholics using a time machine to change history, and having things turn out much differently along the way, “The Red Wing” takes a much different approach to time travel.  Unfortunately the very interesting high concept here is ultimately cast aside in a way that feels more reductive than anything else.

I’m not sure if the central idea for this series has been done before, but this is the first I’ve seen of it.  The idea is that once time travel was discovered, humanity immediately started using it for war by going back and changing history to suit the needs of the winner.  There’s a very insightful monologue about how in order to win a war, one must convince his enemy that they were wrong and make them ashamed of what they once were.  To me, that sounds like a great way to lead off a series about using time travel as warfare.

The problem is that this isn’t what “The Red Wing” is ultimately about.  Though his previous Image work has been fairly light on character, Hickman’s focus here is on Dominic Dorne a young recruit into the title group whose “father” Robert was a pilot that was lost on a mission.  Only Robert didn’t die, he just found himself lost in another era and eventually rescued by the enemy.  Regrettably, the main characters, the supporting cast, and their struggles are fairly one-dimensional and overly familiar.  If they were more interesting then  the book could’ve thrived on the transition from the “time travel as warfare” concept, but they aren’t and it doesn’t.  Not helping matters either is that the paradoxes of “who became who” are never made as clear as they should be, which leads to a final page that’s more of a “Huh?” than an “Oh!  I get it!”  I will certainly concede that the idea of using time travel to explore the idea of a parent having to cope with the world he leaves his kid is a good one, but it feels like a step down from the title’s initial aims.

Nick Pitarra provides the art and as this appears to be his first professional work, it’s not bad.  The man is clearly inspired by Frank Quitely in terms of his characters, level of detail and inventive panel structure.  He still has quite a ways to go as there’s still an awkwardness to his characters’ expressions and how a lot of the sequences are framed.

So “The Red Wing” is more of a “noble failure” than a flat-out fiasco.  It has a lot of good ideas here, but I think that, aside from the flat characterization, its biggest issue is that the Hickman tried to cram too much into too little space.  If this had been an eight-issue series, instead of a four-issue one, then maybe he would’ve found room to give all of the concepts here the development they deserved.