Review: Power Rangers Soul of the Dragon
I received this trade paperback from a friend as a birthday gift. It’s my first dive into Power Rangers comics.
My first trade paperback(TPB)! Throwing it back to a cartoon I used to watch as a kid. Though I must say, even though I watched it as a kid, I don’t remember much of it. The most recent movie from 2017 is the last piece of Power Rangers material I’ve consumed. Which I’m still salty about that they didn’t continue.
I got this TPB from a friend of mine as a birthday present. To be honest, of the 3 trade paperback books I own, I’ve received two of them as gifts from my buddy. One being Transformers Primacy and this one, Soul of the Dragon which is what this review is about. A reminder I will be reviewing the following:
Cover Art
Story
Overall Rating 5 star rating system from Comic Geeks App
Cover
When I first saw the cover, I just thought that it was a cool progression of the Power Ranger suits. I figured the guy on the cover was Tommy since the 2 of the 5 suits that were shown were ones that I knew he wore. Now the other three suits pertained to storylines I hadn’t seen and/or read. But they each looked pretty unique, especially the last one which was a black and gold suit.
I thought this was pretty funny and also answered my first question when reading which was if the public knew they were Power Rangers.
Story
Since this was the first Power Rangers comic I’ve read, I really didn’t know what to expect. I was anticipating something similar to the show but this is definitely a level up. It seems as if the show is geared towards children and the comics are teens and up.
Jumping right in, our lead character Tommy is alerted that something is going on with his son. Upon mentioning that his son, JJ, quit the SPD(Space Patrol Delta) Tommy starts to question if something is really going on. He had just spoken to his son a few days earlier and this wasn’t mentioned to him but we(the reader) see that JJ was jumped by some guys.
This was a great story that featured a special “reason” as to why we got to see Tommy in multiple suits. One thing I really liked about this was I didn’t feel lost while reading it. There were enough context clues to get what is going on if something is referenced that’s not directly in the book. We get to see the variety of suits in action too, so that was a cool feat too.
The art style was really clean with pages often following a monochromatic color scheme that was nice to see. By “clean” I mean the panels, action and especially fight scenes were all distinguishable. Very smooth coloring and separation of objects to clearly indicate what you’re looking at.
Here is an example of the action sequences and how the artwork is very clear in what’s being depicted.
Overall 4.5 / 5
For being my first Power Rangers comic, I thought this ticked all the boxes for what I needed in a story. We had great action scenes, beautiful artwork and colors, a concise story and a decent enough plot that holds water. Honestly, I thought it was really clever how they got the different suits in there and has given me Dragon Ball Z vibes where I just want to see all the suits of every ranger now.