Space Mullet

Jonah, a former Space Marine, and his Zozobian friend Alphius are just a couple of space truckers trying to make ends meet the best they can in a harsh galaxy.  That’s doubly hard when Jonah is living with a price on his head for desertion after his last mission as a marine turned into a massacre.  So when a former comrade of his offers him a proposition – get some footage of the botched operation that has suddenly turned up and his record is clean – Jonah jumps at the chance.  Is it too good to be true?  Probably.  Will it lead him and Alphius into a whole new world of hurt that will see them traveling to Mars and getting involved with its seedy underbelly and thriving violent sports scene?  I wouldn’t rule that out either.

One of the perks of having a hit ongoing series is that everything the creator(s) have ever done winds up getting reprinted, no matter how obscure.  Which is how Daniel Warren Johnson’s first major comics work is being brought back to us in a new edition following the massive success he’s enjoyed on “Transformers.”  As an earlier work of his, I can say that it lacks the dynamic nature of his more recent projects and the detail isn’t quite there either.  However, he still manages to create a thriving world with lots of action that foreshadows the great artist he’d eventually become.

Writing-wise, it’s more disappointing to say that he hasn’t come that much further than where he was when he did this series.  It owes a very deep debt in tone, setting, and style to “Cowboy Bebop” and maybe a check or two to “Aliens,” “Battle Angel Alita,” “Appleseed” and more.  He does manage to give us a couple of sympathetic protagonists and I did like the twists the second arc took, even if the tonal clash between it and the final story is quite large.  It all combines to make “Space Mullet” something that’s easy to recommend for established fans of Johnson, even if the man’s best early work remains “The Ghost Fleet,” his collaboration with Donny Cates.