Rising Son - graphic novel non-review
Supernatural Rising Son a graphic novel
By Peter Johnson, Rebecca Dessertine and Diego Olmos
The artwork in this graphic novel seems truer to how the characters really look, not nearly as dark as the artwork of Origins.
Chapter One: Takes place in 1991. John has noticed that Mary's relatives and friends are all dying. He heads out to find Eddie, Mary's cousin, a trucker who has gone missing.
John tracks Eddie to an out of the way town that appears kind of backwards Stepford wives-ish. Hot women and zombie wussed out men. John finds Eddie who whispers for John to meet him at the bar just as his controlling woman comes to the door.
At the bar later, Eddie tries to warn John away from the town and also tries to give him some info about why Mary was killed, but control woman shows up and takes Eddie home. The waitress starts hitting on John and eventually uses mind control. They go into the bathroom and are about to do the nasty, but John snaps out of it, realizing the town is an out of the way haven for Succubi, living off men who were just passing through.
John goes whomping on all the gals in the bar and they all turn into Mary. Creepy. John keeps chopping and kills them all.
He grabs the boys from the motel and heads over to get Eddie, but Eddie is dead. John kills the last Succubus, but not before she reveals that there are plans for the Winchesters and it was never about Mary. She very pointedly asks, "How are the boys?"
John gets the boys out of Dodge.
A new player-in cat woman type heels and skin-tight leather-shows up at the left-behind Succubi carnage at the bar and asks a half-dead Succubus, "Where is Sam Winchester?"
Chapter Two: Unnerved by the threat of plans for his boys, John settles them out of the hunting life for a while and even takes a mortgage company desk job. Sam's school teacher seems to be all sweet, but it looks suspiciously like she could fill out a skin-tight leather cat woman suit.
A month later, Sam is thriving at school, has lots of friends and loves his teacher because she always tells him how special he is. Uh-huh, not suspicious at all. Dean is very unhappy at school, doesn't have any friends.
John runs into Sam's teacher at a school play where she flirts mercilessly with him. She comes over for dinner and Dean glimpses a weird shadow coming off her, but he is being really moody and doesn't say anything about it. Several weeks go by while they date.
Teacher and John do the bedsheet tango and while John's eyes are closed, hers glow red. Guess Sam really does take after John - bathroom sink sex and banging brunette monsters.
Oh crap, no John don't do it. John has to work so he is trusting his teacher girlfriend to take 8 year-old Sam out of town to his science fair.
Dean sees them getting in the car and finally rushes to tell John he thinks something is wrong with the teacher.
It's too late, they are gone, but John decides to trust Dean and finds out that Sam never made it to the science fair.
They track them down (doesn't explain really how) to a dark train yard. John tells Dean to stay in the car. Teacher is just sitting there on the railroad with an unconscious Sam in her lap. She starts bad guy monologuing about how Sam needs her as a demon mother to prepare him, blah, blah, blah, and flings a whole bunch of railroad crap lying around at John.
The flying crap pulls together and turns into a-what the . . .?-transformer robot or something. Comic book, guess I should have expected some weird thing . . . like . . . no, shaking my head, these drawings and concept are so not working in the way I see the Supernatural world. John looks like a tiny Superman fighting a gigantic robot. Give the man a cape and throw him into the bizarro universe because for the Winchester world this is just stupid.
Chapter Three: Worried, Dean gets out of the car and freaks out, seeing the giant robot. I'm freaked out too, that they even have a stupid giant robot.
Meanwhile the demon teacher is doing some kind of Latin incantation to take Sam to another dimension. He's floating unconscious and everything. While fighting the robot, John starts yanking big chains around, tosses Dean his journal, which just happens to be earmarked to the correct Latin counter ritual and tells Dean to start saying it.
John pulls all the chains into a large demon's trap just as Dean finishes the ritual and the demon teacher is cast away and the robot parts drop.
Sam wakes up and John tells him he fell asleep and his teacher had to go so they came to pick him up. No explanation about why there are broken parts all over, why they are in a rail yard, why John is all bloody . . . and Sam just believes that without question? Doesn't even ask why he missed the fair.
John is wigging out about how the demon wormed her way into his life just to get close to Sam. He calls Bobby from a payphone. When he gets back to the car Sam is outside of it talking to a mysterious man in black. John freaks, Sam runs to him and when they look back the guy is gone.
They get to Bobby's. John tells him about how the demon just wanted Sam and he doesn't know why. Bobby sends him to Silas, a Soothsayer, for answers.
But . . . Silas slipped into a coma on November 2nd, but wakes up just long enough to tell him that Sam is special and Dean needs to be prepared for what's coming, then he slides back into the coma. Of course he does.
John decides that he needs to prepare Dean and so he wakes him up to take him hunting, thinking that Sam is sound asleep, but Sam wasn't asleep and watches them drive off without him.
John actually takes Dean on an ordinary deer hunt to help him get a feel for shooting. Dean stumbles and Sam shows up, shooting the deer, saying the man in the black car brought him so he could learn to hunt too. John is totally freaking out.
Silas wakes up from his coma and wants to see Sam. John and Dean leave them alone at Silas's house, but when they get back the man with the black car has come and killed Silas.
Chapter Four: Things are getting good. Hopefully a giant robot won't show up again to blow it. So John sees the black car following them and rams it off the road. Turns out it's an albino hunter friend of Silas. John thinks he killed Silas so he leaves the boys in the car and takes the guy to a convenient deserted house out by the side of the road and ties the guy up. The hunter claims that Silas told him a leader is rising destined to lead a demon army and that he knows it's Sam and he believes it was Sam who killed Silas.
Three more hunters show up and attack John because it was a trap. Before the hunters can go get Sam, John gets a flare off.
Dean sees the flare from the car and knows it's John's signal for them to run. He's only 12, but the kid jumps over the seat and drives.
Albino hunter takes off in his car after the boys, leaving John tied up, guarded by the other three. Yeah, we know what's going to happen and it does. John pulls out his hidden knife, unties himself and kills the hunters. He hijacks a big rig to get to his boys before albino dude kills Sam.
Albino catches up to them, stuffs Sam inside his trunk. Dean pulls a gun on him and they have a little stand off. John shows up and they have a huge knife fight and Dean shoots the guy. His first kill.
Chapter Five: John puts together a list of hunter friends of the albinos who might come after Sam. And he goes after them. Pretty brutal. Then he decides to take the boys off the radar and holes up at a cabin belonging to a friend of Bobby's.
One night they feel something coming, so John and Dean put Sam down in a hole in the floor with a hatch and tell him not to come out no matter what he hears. Demons surround the cabin.
Dean gets Sam out of the hatch and they run into the woods while John lures the demons into the cabin and catches them in a devil's trap and blows up the cabin, but not before one of the demons reveals that the school teacher from before name is Lilith. Holy crapola, that means that John and Lilith once . . . eeeww, and then later she wanted to seal the deal that way with Sam. Double eeeww.
John leaves the boys with a couple from the first SPN graphic novel Origins, Bill and Pam, but of course Pam is possessed and now John isn't there. Great.
Chapter Six: Oh crap. Pam opens the door and lets Lilith in. Dean recognizes her as the demon Teacher he sent away and tells Sam to run. Lilith backhands the snot out of little Dean.
Meanwhile, John is heading back to the house.
Meanwhile, meanwhile, Dean grabs some salt and pours lines around the room him and Sam have blockaded themselves in. Sam still doesn't understand what is going on about demons.
John gets back home, exorcises Pam and rushes up stairs.
Lilith couldn't get past the salt lines at the door so she simply crashed through the wall, and knocks Dean unconscious and is looking for Sam who is in the closest. John runs in and gets rid of Lilith. For now anyway.
Fast forward to Dean driving onto the Stanford University campus to get Sam because John is missing.
My Overall Thoughts: Hmmm. Well. Didn't hate it, but it didn't seem to have a lot of substance for a plot either. Highlights were mainly John's internal thoughts about whether his boy was evil and destined to lead a dark army, yet he was relentless in how far he'd go to protect him also-so I really loved that because it fits with how I view John. There was also a really nice moment when he shows Sam the sunrise and how it banishes any darkness.
The robot scene, however, was entirely too ridiculous and as much as I like the character of Lilith . . . on the show she was scary, but in this that scariness didn't translate. She seemed more demented, wanting to raise Sam as her own. It's possibly because she didn't have that eerie scary childlike innocence all the actresses, young and old, brought to her character on the show. This one was just a hard-core shank.
And Sam's character just didn't jive with his true character. I know he is only eight in this and in following canon had to remain ignorant of the whole Supernatural world. Yes, I'm glad they didn't make him aware yet, because then I would complain about that (these poor writers can't win), but, it also seemed unlikely after going through all this that with his perpetually curious mind he wasn't questioning anything or putting two and two together. He just kinda went along with every lame explanation John and Dean told him about really bad "people". That just didn't feel like true Sam to me. Perhaps I'd buy it if the excuses weren't so awful. Though in fairness, I'm not sure what the writers could have done better with only little dialogue bubbles to work with.
So would I recommend this? Half-heartedly, I guess. It's worth a quick thumb-through at any rate.
There is a three page Bonus story by Eric Kripke at the end, which is funny. He really has a beautiful whacked out mind and totally makes fun of himself in this Ghost facers Winchester haters parody of Sam and Dean as the monster of the week (yes, singular cuz they are a conjoined monster with fabulous high cheekbones) that the Facers have to heroically gank.
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