The adventure of Kraken starts about where you’d expect for a pulpy thriller. It’s 1931 somewhere in the Coral Sea, and Captain Kraken and his fierce beautiful companion fight blood-thirsty pirates in service to the villainous Baron Black. That breathless sentence alone would make Shannon Eric Denton and David Hartman’s Kraken worth a fun read, but that’s just the prologue.
Unfortunately for Captain Kraken, his story is as much H.P. Lovecraft as it is Lester Dent. Baron Black actually does practice black magic, and opens a rift to another dimension above the south seas. To save his fellow adventurers, Kraken flies into the vortex, never to return.
Not exactly. Three years later his plane flies out, but Captain Kraken has been changed in more ways than one. His mission is no longer just to fight evildoers, but evil itself. For on the other side of that vortex, horribly twisted monsters are made. And they’re breaking through. Conveniently, aided by Baron Black.
It gets wilder and more wonderful. As I predicted before reading the book, Denton and Hartman have stuffed just about everything they love into this series. Before the vortex, Kraken is a two-fisted red-blooded American hero. Afterward, he can still masquerade but never pretend. He’ll throw fists first, but don’t discount the tentacles.
Like a good pulp, he’s got a fine assortment of people who fight by his side depending on the adventure. Neither creators compromise there — these are characters that would have had to be coded in a Street & Smith magazine, but are unabashedly diverse and handy when trouble brews. That’s not counting the ghost pirate skull Captain Jevons and the monkey with a gun, whose loyalties remain to be seen.
Reading these pages feels like an animated adventure series you wish existed. Which makes sense, as Hartman worked on a variety of favorite series, including Trese and Transformers: Robots in Disguise. His characters may be sharp-edged, but that carries the action more dynamically. Denton matches him writing scenes that shift from high adventure to grim horror, with that gun-toting monkey in between.
Special shout out to letterer/designer Kristen Fitzer Denton, who helps it all feel like a combination of tiki and art deco. She also had a stroke of genius with the ghostly Captain Jevons, whose dialogue appears in a welcome throwback to the crypt.
Kraken the graphic novel is complete unto itself, but like any good pulp adventure, the end is only the chance for Kraken to take a breath before he’s onto the next one. What’s extra clever is that Denton and Hartman could go backwards if they wanted; the unchanged Kraken probably has a couple of good tales in him. But I get it. There’s a war looming, and he has Nazis to punch.
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