[DreamSword]

Go Go Power Rangers Volume 5

While slightly less focused on character and more on backstory, this volume is still all kinds of great and I really don't like how the official reading order provided by BOOM skips over it.

There's alot of great stuff here in terms of lore. The backstory of Rita and Zordon, the first Alpha robot, how Zack and Jason met... and it's all presented under the overarching theme of being torn between two worlds. That's not to say this all just dialogue though.

Not only do we have cool callbacks to stuff like the Blade Blaster Tower Formation and the body swap machine from MMPR proper, but Carlini draws alot of really great shots all throughout these issues, making for a very visually stimulating experience ontop of the great story that goes along with it. Even the faces have improved a fair deal since last volume.

But yeah, there's alot of cool stuff here in terms of the story. My favorite aspect being Rita and Kim's' relationships with their parents and how they mirror eachother. As someone who's also been torn between feuding parents, the feelings of a child caught in that situation were portrayed rather well. And it's certainly much more engrossing for me than the shipping of Trini and Jason that I'm really not a fan of.

And on the topic of Rita, I did like how this comic shows that despite who she ended up becoming, there is still good in her.

The last thing I wanna note, and I don't even know if it was really all that intentional given how much of a footnote this moment in the arc itself is, but the story does touch on the cycle of war and violence, and shows that the intent of such a thing can still be there despite the difference in method. Many recent stories in tokusatsu have talked about bringing peace as a solution to conflict, but Alpha-1 here instead sees a giant act of violence as a final solution. And what that in and of itself is nothing super new in storytelling, it definitely stands out in regards to the sorts of stories we've been seeing more of as time has gone on.

Oh, also, turns out the Dragon Shield comes from Rita's' mother, and that's just a really neat detail.