Zombos Says: Good
Once again, the Nazis are up to no good in Half Past Danger. This time around they’ve got dinosaurs and a deadly secret, with Stephen Mooney and a very good period-toned coloration from Jordie Bellair tying it all together into a neat package wrapped around with colorful main players.
There’s a Samurai-wielding Japanese Naval Landing Forces ex-soldier; a super GI soldier–but he doesn’t carry around a shield; an Irish soldier who carries around a bottle or two that’s either half-empty or half-full at any given moment; a femme fatale with long black hair and a fetish for long black jumpsuits who carries the mission’s intrigue; and the German Officer they’re up against, who carries the usual supercilious attitude and Aryan-inspired confidence of cool determination we’ve come to expect from our movie and comic book German Officer nemeses.
Much grease gun and fiery mayhem explodes across this collected six issues’ worth of vibrant, retro-storied pages, which hints a little The Lost World: Jurassic Park, a little multi-chaptered Republic Serial, and with Bellair’s appropriate earth tones, military tones, Nazi tones, submarine interior tones, and jungle campfire at night tones, smoothing Mooney’s heavy lines (that are too heavy at times, obliterating facial nuances), it all moves breezily and 1943’s-ish through hold-on-to-your-ass military exploits, haul-your-ass dinosaur-stomped jungles, torpedo shooting submarines, dastardly deeds, and well-timed revelations. Mooney draws and quarters his story evenly across six issues with minimal loss of melodramatic pacing while maintaining his characters’ dynamics (sure, they may all be stereotypes, but they’re still well-executed stereotypes), making his story an entertaining read from start to finish within each issue.
And watching people get eaten by dinosaurs, especially nasty Nazi people, is always a pleasure for horror fans to see, of course. And watching samurai swords slice through impossible things, with maybe a neck or two in the way, is fun to see, too.