Review: Gold Key: Alliance #1 (of 5)
Gold Key Comics. When old-time comic fans hear the name, they think of a company that, from 1962 to 1984, published boatloads of licensed titles, from Star Trek and The Twilight Zone to Battle of the Planets and Mickey Mouse. But Gold Key also published a number of original titles whose characters have survived, in one form or another, to the present day: Magnus, Robot Fighter; Turok, Son of Stone; Mighty Samson; The Occult Files of Dr. Spektor; Doctor Solar, Man of the Atom.
We meet the latest iterations of these characters in Gold Key: Alliance #1, written by Phil Hester (Green Arrow, The Bionic Man), illustrated by Brent Peeples (Legenderry: Green Hornet), and published by Dynamite Entertainment. Set in the present day, in it we find a Turok who’s a Parks Department ranger, protecting a tribal park that’s home to roaming dinosaurs; a Magnus who’s a Secret Service agent with a strong dislike for robots; an African woman who apparently is a new Solar; and a Samson who’s rampaging through the streets of New York.
It’s a strange situation—after all, Magnus’s backstory has always been that he lives in the 41st century, Turok originally hailed from 15th-century America, and Samson normally stomped around a postapocalyptic wasteland—so there’s a strong undercurrent that some sort of time-travel shenanigans must be involved. If that’s the case, then who pulled these people out of their normal eras—and why? Given this first issue is all setup, it’s a mystery Hester and Peeples don’t go into any detail in explaining, but it should keep readers guessing until the inevitable resolution.
Bottom line? The mystery of just what is going on here makes for an intriguing setup for this miniseries, although fans of the classic versions of the Gold Key characters—possibly even fans of the Valiant Universe iterations of Magnus, Turok, and Solar—might be initially put off by this new approach. Still, Gold Key: Alliance is worth checking out, if only to see where Hester is heading, plot-wise, before the eventual group team-up. Give it a try.
Gold Key: Alliance #1
Written by Phil Hester
Art by Brent Peeples
Main cover art by Felipe Massafera
Publisher: Dynamite Entertainment
32 pages • full-color
$3.99 U.S.
Now on sale
About the Author
Steven Roman Steven A. Roman is the author of the Saga of Pandora Zwieback novel series and the graphic novels Lorelei: Sects and the City and Sunn, and the bestselling author of the novels X-Men: The Chaos Engine Trilogy and Final Destination: Dead Man’s Hand. Follow his adventures in publishing at StarWarp Concepts.
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