What’s interesting about Wild Blue Yonder #1 is that there’s almost no blue in the yonder. Throughout most of this inaugural issue, the sky is brown or red or orange or gray. Only one page plus one panel actually features blue sky, even though half the story takes place in mid-air. Everything else is mostly rusty brown and red. Such is the state of the post-industrial, post-civilized world.
Mike Raicht is the scripter, Zach Howard is the artist and they are both credited alongside Austin Harrison with the story of Wild Blue Yonder, which tells of a dying, polluted, choked Earth which forced humanity to relocate to giant airships in the sky. Well, the chosen few did that, while the rest labored in mines and hoped to join the skyfolk someday. However, life in the wild blue ain’t no great shakes, either, as some bad guy named The Judge runs a fleet that dominates the skies, hounding folks like those aboard The Dawn for resources (namely, The Dawn itself, a solar-powered craft) and forcing them into constant dogfights with warbirds and jetpacks and such.
Supplies are scarce, as is personnel, which is why our crackerjack pilot Cola is sent to a bar like The Peak, a mountaintop watering hole that’s the last place on Earth that serves whiskey, to find a new gunner for her plane after the old one died under tragic circumstances. She finds a disgruntled miner named Tug and drags him aboard, despite the objections of her dog Critter, who wears pilot goggles for reasons unknown (i.e. to look all cool), which seems sort of cruel to force on a puppy. Even a mean one. Anyone, Tug’s trial by fire commences quickly, as The Dawn is under fire from The Judge’s Wraiths. We’ve got a goof named Scram on jetpack and axe-in-the-head duty, Cola’s mom Olivia as the captain of The Dawn, and a lot of hotshot fighter pilot action going on. And, after they drive off the Wraiths, we witness the particular sort of hardline cruelty of The Judge himself, who should be played by Ving Rhames in the eventual movie.
Wild Blue Yonder definitely feels like a movie franchise or TV series waiting to happen. It has a basic Star Wars sort of set-up what with the evil empire and the rebel fleet and such, although with a shell game of personality traits mixed up here and there. Cola’s got a bit of Han Solo hot-dogging and authority-bucking (complete with Critter as her Wookiee), although she looks more like Luke Skywalker and can still be cowed by her mother, and The Judge is very Vadery in his demeanor, if not his look. There is potential for some Battlestar Galactica elements mixed in as well, what with being a crew of folks stuck on a big freighter with nowhere to go but away from their pursuers. It’s got everything you need for a cool motion picture experience, and Howard’s art really proves that. His faces are great, his dogfights are intense and he brings this book to a higher level. Nelson Daniel’s rusty coloring work helps set the tone, implying perhaps a greater steampunk aesthetic than is actually present, but despite the decaying Earth below, I hope Wild Blue Yonder gets a little more blue and a little less brown. Makes it easier to breathe.
Overall, Wild Blue Yonder #1 is entertaining and quite forgivably derivative, and it sets an interesting stage for what promises to be some quality adventure storytelling,
