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Ray Park breaks into comics with new Snake Eyes series.
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IDW's Snake Eyes
Face it, Ray Park rocks. He was the best part of Star Wars: Episode I - The Phantom Menace, made a creepy cool villain out of Toad in X-men, and was the only good thing about the G.I. Joe movie. Everyone knows the G.I. Joe movie sucked. It was an insult to the hind quarters of every audience member that actually sat through the whole thing. Why did we do it? They had Ray Park playing Snake Eyes! Surely there would be at least one redeeming fight scene in the whole movie. Unfortunately, there wasn't. But that wasn't Park's fault. He was doing his thing, with all the skill and mastery he possesses, he was just being filmed by a real shoddy director.
Thankfully, IDW isn't going to let that crappy film be Park's only association with the coolest Joe in the ranks. A new solo series starring Snake Eyes is on the shelves now, and Ray Park is given co-scripting credit. This is a good thing, IDW is allowing Park to stake a claim to the character, and hopefully, if this new series does well, it might convince Hollywood to treat the fans with an entire film centered around Park's portrayal of Snake Eyes. If that happens, we can only hope they get a good director to helm it.
The first issue of IDW's Snake Eyes series leaves much to be desired, unfortunately. The plot is exceedingly thin. One can't expect Ray Park to jump into comic writing and have a hit from the get-go, which is why he was assisted by co-writer Kevin van Hook. But even that collaboration didn't help. The story takes off from the movie's continuity, since the costumes and flashback sequences match the film's. Someone is impersonating Snake Eyes and killing high-level lowlifes in Japan. So, naturally, in typical contrived genre fashion, General Hawk sends Snake Eyes in to investigate. There's a Scarlet cameo early on, where she wants Snake Eyes to accompany her on her mission. General Hawk says he's already assigned to this impersonator thing, but says he knows Snake would prefer to go with her. Duh... who wouldn't?
The story is supposed to take place in the village where Snake Eyes was trained by Storm Shadow's family, the Arashikage clan. I'm pretty sure there was a name established for this village by Larry Hama in the old Marvel series. While I can't remember the name, there's no excuse for the writers to not have done their research. Instead we get the caption "Small village in Japan."
The art is also disappointing. Not so much the style of it, but the layouts. Lee Ferguson is actually quite awesome. His style is reminiscent of Mike Parobeck, it being a sparsely detailed clean line rendering that gives it an animated look. But often the characters look too much alike, especially in the flashback sequence, which makes it hard to tell who is who. The dialogue captions often point to characters off panel, which makes hard to tell who's talking if there's more than one character in the scene. And the fight choreography is drawn from odd, and cluttered, angles which makes it hard to tell what's going on. If they were trying to make it as much like the film as possible, they've succeeded.
This is only the first issue. There's a chance for it to get better as the series goes on. I like Ray Park and Snake Eyes enough to lend my support, but if one isn't a die-hard fan of these guys, this isn't going to be a satisfying read at all. Yet there's always the possibility of improvement, so here's hoping Park and Snake Eyes get their due.
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