“Yesterday’s” Comic> Meteor Man #1

He overcomes his acrophobia, just to fly into a lighting storm.

Meteor Man #1

Marvel (August, 1993)

Set after the event of Robert Townsend’s movie (yes, another Amazon affiliate link, but I honestly like the movie), Jefferson Reed, the Meteor Man, finds his powers ebbing again. Hope may come from a meteor that crashed into a biodome in Arizona. Our heroes fly in from Washington, DC in the hopes that this is from the same meteor and can restore Jeff’s Meteor Man powers. However, someone else wants that power, and when he can’t buy the rock he plans to steal it just as he did stealing Simon Caine from the Vault Guardsmen taking him away, only instead of supervillains Ghost Strike and Malefactor it’s a good old-fashioned goon brigade. Jeff and his friend Mike make it into the facility but Mike is gunned down and so is Jeff, but Jeff lands on the meteor, which explodes!

What they got right: They remembered Meteor Man was losing his powers at the end of the movie with a quick recharge thanks to another piece of the meteor. So now we have a larger meteor and a reason to give Jeff his powers back. I like that they included the important details of the movie for people who hadn’t seen it in the theater or read their movie adaptation, which I don’t have. I do have the movie on DVD, though–which I do play to review in the future.

What they got wrong: There are so many other decisions here I don’t get. The big one for me was that so many characters were #$%$# swearing. Censored like I did there yes, but this was Townsend’s first foray into family movies (he had been known more for raunchy comedies like his HBO specials or something like Hollywood Shuffle, both of which were far away from this movie) so swearing as often as it happens here just doesn’t feel right. Mike doesn’t look that much like Eddie Griffin but Jeff is as close as you can get to Robert Townsend. I also question setting this in the Marvel universe, seeing as there already IS a Meteor Man in the Marvel universe, a supervillain who got his powers from an unknown gas trapped in a meteor. I hope somewhere in the three issues I don’t own the two fought like Erik Josten and Luke Cage did over the right to call themselves Power Man. A quick look at the covers tells me they didn’t. Instead he fights Night Thrasher in one story. Night Thrasher. And not the other Meteor Man. Geez.

Recommendation: There is a certain curiosity here but I can’t give a final recommendation until I read the next issue next week. Might be interesting if you liked the movie, and I appear to again be in the minority.