Skip to main content
PBS logo
 
 

Book Review of Kevin Smith's Green Hornet TP Vol 01: Sins of the Father

Kevin Smith's Green Hornet TP Vol 01: Sins of the Father
kuligowskiandrewt avatar reviewed on + 569 more book reviews


In "The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay", Michael Chabon makes reference to his comic artist Josef Kavalier making regular trips to the cinema not for personal entertainment, but to learn cinematography tricks that he could apply to his drawings. This initiative and innovation, combined with his talent, made him a well-respected artist in the field.

In "The Green Hornet Volume 1: Sins of the Father", the fictitious concept described above is applied in the real world. Kevin Smith wrote a script for a prospective Green Hornet movie which was never made. (In fact, an alternative Green Hornet movie was eventually made using other creative talents.) It was suggested that they take the script and convert it to a comic book limited series.

In my opinion, the results were mixed. The art itself is quite nice from a visual standpoint AND it also does a good job in allowing the reader to advance the story. Not perfect for example, some of the "pages" actually need to be read left-to-right across both left and right pages, as opposed to the traditional one-page-at-a-time technique. It was not clear to me, the reader, this was the case, and required me to do a little rereading before I understood what was going on.

The plot was nice enough, although a little stereotypical. The Green Hornet and Kato successfully retired from their pseudo-criminal illusion which was actually their successful attempt to fight crime. Both raised a child, who end up following in their footsteps when the crime syndicates return to take over the city.

There are a lot of action sequences in this book, as befits a visual medium. At some times, it felt like the fight scenes ran on too long for me, though and avoided the need to perform any character development.

It was worth moving on to the second part (of 2) of this series, and was pleasant enough, but out of all of the comics I've ever read, this was simply one of them.

Rating: 3 1/2 stars, rounded down to 3 stars where 1/2 stars are not permitted.