It’s the showdown of the century between the Power Rangers and the Empyreals. In a story Ryan Parrott has been building towards for some time, he ties the teenage superheroes to a centuries-old history involving Lord Zedd and Zordon. Blending action with ancient drama can only mean one thing: Good comics!
Much like many issues in this series, the book opens over ten thousand years ago on a faraway planet. War seems to have annihilated an entire people, but something else is afoot. Something that works so well with the way this series uses flashbacks is how to build up the stakes and tension as the fight facing the Power Rangers has been building for centuries. It does come off as a tease since there isn’t a lot to learn from it, but it’s intriguing all the same.
Carrying forward where we left off, Zordon seems to be dead and Billy is on the run in the Command Center. Billy hasn’t been in the good graces of Zordon for a while, but as this issue reveals, his secret side projects may be paying off in a big way. These quieter moments help progress sub plots and break up the main action well.
The main action, drawn wonderfully by Marco Renna with colors by Walter Baiamonte, is particularly good at showing energy effects. That goes for the transformation into a Power Ranger, but also laser blasts too. In an intense action sequence with the Power Rangers a simple glint of a sword isn’t enough and instead, there is energy encircling characters while the ground bursts up with blows between characters. There even seems to be a glow on characters adding an extra energy dimension and Baiamonte uses interesting glint effects on the Power Rangers visors to create a 3D effect.
How cool is that costume change?
Credit: BOOM!
The best scene in this issue has to be Lord Zedd’s conversation with a key figure in the Eltarian War. Ever since we’ve learned Lord Zedd’s origin he’s become a more intriguing character and one that may not be pure evil necessarily. Parrott takes Zedd’s convo here and adds layers to him by not only showing how he’s fought the Power Rangers and knows they aren’t so easily defeated, but also how he sees a common enemy growing confident. It leads to an interesting turn in the story that could make for quite a battle in future issues.
This issue is also doing some key table setting for the battle to come. Often in comics, the table setting is the main feature, but Parrott and Renna have enough subplots going at once to keep the action moving. It does feel like a tease in some of the plots — it barely moves forward in some of them — but it’s keeping the story interesting.
The Eltarian War is going to go down as a magnum opus for the Power Rangers mythos, and if it wasn’t evident yet, Mighty Morphin #13 shows that and then some. This story is pushing the Power Rangers into a situation like no other, in a battle that has been thousands of years in the making, while integrating Lord Zedd in a tantalizing way.
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