Kevin-Smith

Back in January I wrote about Kevin Smith’s take on The Green Hornet. In February I wrote about Mark Waid’s first two Green Hornet volumes. Although it’s not unheard of with the Big Two, it’s certainly much more rare to have the freedom to interpret characters as you wish. Take a character as iconic as Spider-Man. Until Miles Morales (nearly 50 years into the character’s history), Spider-Man was always Peter Parker. Nearly every aspect of his character is immutable. In fact, that’s one of the reasons his marriage was dissolved - he didn’t have the old Parker luck with women. Yet, because Dynamite is working with licensed properties a few volumes at a time, each writer gets a lot more leeway in how they can interpret the character (with only the licensor typically making any objections).

As I mentioned in my John Carter first look, I’m somewhat new to Dynamite’s properties; more accurately, their licensed properties. When I attended the Pulp Panel at Baltimore Comic-Con 2014, I was interested in the Green Hornet for the first time. My only previous exposure was the trailer for the Seth Rogan film. I knew it was an old character from the time of the radio serials, but not much else. But after hearing about Mark Waid’s take on it, I flagged it as something to check out. Luckily for me, this year Dynamite did a Humble Bundle which included Kevin Smith’s Green Hornet. With the current near glut of comic book movies going to the silver screen, it was interesting to learn that Smith’s run on the comic was based on a Miramax movie script he wrote, but which was never produced. As a Kevin Smith fan, this intrigued me. Let’s first take a brief walk through the plot before looking at some of the themes Smith employs as well as any cinema-ness that sticks out compared to traditional comics. The story open in what, at least to me, appears to be an unspecified time period. Smith seems to be deliberately leaving it open to interpretation whether this takes place in the 1930s of the original Green Hornet stories or a more modern time. The Green Hornet (Britt Reid) takes out the last crime family and retires. Unlike Batman, his appearance does not lead to escalation of ever crazier criminals. Perhaps unrealistically, he has now reach his goal and instead of being corrupted by power, he’s just happy that his city has been rid of all the crime families. His wife knows he’s the Green Hornet, but his son does not.