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Voltron: Legendary Defender, Volume 1: 03/03/17
As I've mentioned before (and as anyone who follows my Tumblr knows), I'm a fan of Voltron. I missed most of the reboots in the 1990s and early 2000s, but I have been gleefully watching the Netflix / Dreamworks version and am now following the comic that goes with it. While I do try to devote a sizable portion of my book reviews here for curated reading — suggested reading from a subset of genres an interests, I do leave room for fun reading, spontaneous reading. Voltron: Legendary Defender, Volume 1 by Tim Hedrick falls into the fun reading and I suspect it was fun to write and illustrate too. In my review of Shelter from the Storm the first of a five part Voltron graphic novel series by Brian Smith I laid out the long, bizarre history of the story of a robot made up of five lion shaped space ships. I won't rehash that here. The Dreamworks relaunch isn't a rehashing of original story arc. Instead, as interviews with the team have stated, it's more a retelling of the show we all remember watching. As the show is being run as single cour seasons with a limited number of episodes to follow major plot arcs and world build, not every character gets their moment to tell their story. This book fills in some of those gaps. Volume 1 takes the time between "Rebirth" and "Crystal Venom", episodes eight and nine. While Allura is recovering from her efforts to revive the Balmera, Coran takes the Paladins to an old training spot. The training though, gets waylaid when Coran is caught up in some old gambling debts and the Paladins have to go through a series of trials to fetch an extremely valuable pearl. While the opening and closing chapters (or originally, comic book issues) are from a third person point of view, the middle chapters get into the heads of some of the characters: Hunk, Lance, and Pidge. To see some of the highlights from the book, I've posted some favorite panels onto my Tumblr. The most popular of them has turned out to be Lance complaining that they'll have to "form blazing shucker." Five stars Comments (0) |