Unfortunately, the title pretty much spoils the surprise: The invaders are intelligent dinosaurs, returning in their giant spaceships to reclaim Earth from the puny mammals that replaced them in the food chain. Espinosa reveals the bad guys in a cool scene on the moon, in which some astronauts discover a giant footprint—and then the things that made the footprint.
As far as high-concept pitches go, it's kind of hard to beat "Independence Day meets Jurassic Park" for that perfect blend of totally awesome and slightly stupid. As far as the execution goes, it's a little hard to judge how well Espinosa pulls off this dream summer blockbuster movie of a comic book at this point, as this issue only constitutes the first fifth of the story. So far we've only seen the briefest, most teasing glimpses of dinosaurs in glowing metal armor, as the human characters scurry about expositing, but so far, so good.
Captain Gravity and the Power of the Vril
Penny-Farthing Press
It's rather unfortunate that this great graphic novel has such a clumsy and dated-sounding title, one that's more likely to repel readers than attract them. Of course, what they say about judging a book by its cover (that is, not doing it) goes triple for judging a book by the title on its spine.
As cheesy-sounding as it is, Captain Gravity and the Power of the Vril is actually intentionally cheesy-sounding, as it is meant to echo the titles of the sorts of Saturday-matinee serials that the masked hero with gravity powers is featured in, like Captain Gravity and the Oriental Menace or Captain Gravity and the Wizard of Venus.
The real Captain Gravity is Joshua Jones, a young black man who fled the racist American South for Hollywood and stumbled upon Element 115, which gave him powers over gravity itself. While he hides his identity (and race) behind a costume, his friends and confidants—director C.F. Avery and actress/damsel-in-distress Chase DuBois—make serials about the Captain, played on-set by a white guy.
Writer Joshua Dysart evokes Golden Age Hollywood at the dawn of World War II through compelling period details here, while launching the characters into a story that mixes action-adventure tropes of the day with a more post-modern sense of realism. Captain Gravity may face Nazi sorcerers and magic-wielding storm troopers bent on discovering Atlantis and mastering the mysterious "vril" power (a staple of the sci-fi of the day), but Dysart plays it all straight as an arrow, paying particular attention to fleshing out his characters.
Nazis may have long since become stock villains, but Dysart makes even these go-to bad guys complex characters, with real, palpable motivations. Even the one with a skull for a face (a sure sign of supervillainy) gets a whole chapter devoted to explaining how he went from being a German citizen to a "good German" to a Nazi to a cackling villain. In fact, the only villain in the piece who seems completely irredeemable is Adolf Hitler himself, who gets plenty of panel time.
Fans of Indiana Jones, Hellboy or The Rocketeer should find a lot to like here, as Captain Gravity pushes the same buttons as those other inspired-by-serials stories, but Dysart tells a much deeper, more graceful story than any of those works have managed.