I have a fondness for the pulp-inspired, Golden Age hero style of Captain Gravity... when I first saw the promos, I was struck by memories of The Rocketeer movie and how cool I thought that was. Unfortunately, I was mostly unimpressed with the previous miniseries, which took a strong visual and gave it a pretty milquetoast hero to back it up. So Dysart is on shaky ground with me to start, as I don't really have any built-in fondness for the character beyond his cool visual. Dysart doesn't help matters by starting out in the uninteresting Hollywood setting that was to my mind a big flaw of the original story, but as things go on and we learn of a pending relocation and a plot involving Nazi occultists and foreign intelligence services, I found myself drawn more and more into the book.
While I'm uncertain as to whether or not the story will be up my alley, however, there's one thing Captain Gravity should be commended for, and that's putting former Black Panther art team Sal Velluto and Bob Almond front and center once more. Their work here, with colorist Mike Garcia, captures the lush, cinematic period that Dysart is aiming for and features their trademark realistic and distinctive character designs. The work is stunningly detailed, whether it's the geography of 1930s Hollywood, the convincing look of the Captain Gravity costume or the period cars and costumes. Garcia's colors are a tad too much on the brown side for me, as if he was aiming for a sepia-tone look but instead hit one that dulls his otherwise strong color sense, but in general, the book looks terrific.
There's a lot of story in these pages, and that's something Dysart should be commended for. He makes the book approachable to the wide audience that probably don't know Captain Gravity (after all, it came out six years ago) and packs in a lot of build-up to the story he'll be telling in this miniseries. The stuff on the set of the latest "Captain Gravity" film seems a bit superfluous, because the story really gets going when Josh joins his friend Chase and her friend Jan Gunther, but it's also a natural starting point, so it's hard to complain too much. At any rate, Dysart makes excellent use of the page count here, with a lot of backstory, good character introductions, an intriguing plot and a solid cliffhanger.
If I have one problem in particular with Captain Gravity, it's that in attempting to capture the pulp/Golden Age tone it both spreads the net too wide and misses a couple of crucial elements. The flashback sequence to the origin reveals that the creator of Captain Gravity maybe should have left a few things out, as it contains aliens, Aztecs, Nazis, Hollywood and ancient tombs, and it's all a bit too much for a simple origin. However, at the same time, if another complaint I have about Captain Gravity is that it really misses the hard-boiled noir feel in terms of its lead character. The visual of a character with a pistol and a helmet ready to take to the sky implies a strong, tough, hero and Josh is actually a bit of a wuss in comparison to that ideal. Sure, he speaks up for himself, but he's at best a decent guy, and doesn't really have the inspiring quality that a pulp hero should have at this point.
That said, the story being developed here is interesting despite what I find to be a weak central character. I loved the use of a well-known figure in real-life intelligence work, and the twist to what Chase DuBois is actually up to. I quite enjoyed a look at the Nazi ideology from the point of view of characters in the 1930s, when some were unsettled but it was possible to argue that Hitler and his regime were just being misunderstood... it makes for an interesting story where the reader can spot the bad guys a mile away, but the heroes can't be faulted for not picking up on it yet. A shame that Dysart gives up the ambiguity on the last page, but he does so for a pretty effective visual cliffhanger, and one that has me curious to see what comes next. 7/10
