Princess of Mars no more.
Dejah Thoris is the second relaunched comic featuring a familiar Dynamite Entertainment heroine to hit the stands this year. Sadly, it’s far from the success Red Sonja #1 was. This first issue offers an accessible gateway into the Barsoom universe, but it doesn’t offer enough incentive for new readers to stick around.
The idea with this latest Dejah Thoris comic is to downplay the “Princess of Mars” angle and explore what happens when she becomes a wanted fugitive and is forced to assume a new identity. That’s a perfectly decent premise. The problem is in the execution. The script is very plain and matter-of-fact to the point of being boring and flat. Plenty of bad things happen to Dejah and her husband, John Carter, in these pages, but little of it connects on an emotional level. The dialogue is clunky and burdened with a lot of exposition, which winds up making most of the characters sound identical.
The art doesn’t do much to inject life into a lifeless script. Francesco Manna’s character designs are attractive enough, but there’s little emotion in his facial work. The storytelling also suffers from cluttered page layouts. There’s not much energy to the story as it is, given the emphasis on dialogue and exposition, but there’s little flow to the pages when there is action to be had.
All that being said, there is potential with Dejah’s new status quo. Her life is far more unpredictable and dangerous as a result of the events in this first issue. The question is whether the series can find its voice once all the plodding setup is finished and develop into something more compelling.
Dejah Thoris #1 may be accessible to new readers, but this relaunched series doesn’t do much to convince anyone to stick around. This issue is dull, plodding, and more concerned with setting up Dejah’s new status quo than actually making the reader care about her plight.
