Comic Review: Mighty Morphin Power Rangers #41

Mighty Morphin Power Rangers #41

BOOM! Studios

Writer: Ryan Parrott

Artist: Daniele Di Nicuolo

Mighty Morphin Power Rangers #41 is a perfect example of why this run of Power Rangers Comics from BOOM! Studios is amazing and should be read by Ranger fans, young and old.  Issue #40 saw the Rangers reset the universe and the Morphin Grid back to its original state before Drakkon broke everything in Shattered Grid and also saw a time jump in the lives of the Power Rangers. We skipped forward in time to the point in the original tv show where Jason, Trini, and Zack left the team (and the show) and were replaced by Rocky, Aisha, and Adam. It also gave us our first appearance of Tommy Oliver as the White Ranger.  But that’s not the only first appearance in that issue. We get our first glimpse of the OMEGA RANGERS!

In the show, the reason Jason, Trini, and Zack left was because they were chosen to be Angel Grove’s representatives at the World Peace Conference in Switzerland – a shaky reason to be sure. Now it turns out that they really left to go on a secret side mission at the behest of the Blue Emissary, one of the Morphin Masters we met during Shattered Grid (think of them as Power Ranger celestials or deities). The secret mission is protecting and rebuilding a world called Safehaven along with the 4th member of their team, a purple-skinned alien named Kiya and their robot handler XI. All of it feels incredibly fresh and exciting but at the same time familiar but not in a tired way.  

While the Rangers are helping rebuild the town they’re in, they get called away to their command center and sent on a mission and we get to see the Omega Rangers recite their Morphin calls for the first time and I absolutely love them. I won’t spoil what they are here but every Ranger team has a theme to it and this one is no different. The theme and basis for their powers have me incredibly excited for the coming stories as well as if the Omega Rangers will have any individual powers and what their Zords will be.

One of the big problems I have with this issue, though, is that I feel like I’m dropped in the middle of the story without and preface or preamble, it feels like I’m missing an issue. For instance, in the massive crossovers that DC and Marvel are notorious for, there’s usually a main mini-series or central ongoing book for the crossover and then a handful of tie-ins and such.  For Necessary Evil, I feel like I’m missing one of those tie-ins.  Now Necessary Evil is a crossover with Go Go Power Rangers and I did flip through the most recent issue of that but the only connection to the goings-on in MMPR #41 is that the Blue Emissary appears to Jason at the end of the book.  I feel like I’m missing a big chunk of the story and don’t have all the juicy details that I would like for a book like this, i.e. the Omega Rangers first morph, the presentation of their morphers, introduction to the Emissary, and a mission briefing of sorts.  All things that would help give context and further the story.

A huge challenge in introducing a new ranger team is figuring out the look and feel of their suits and I have to say Daniele Di Nicuolo absolutely nailed it. The Omega Ranger suits have a definite Japanese quality to them and while they feel inspired by the Power Rangers Samurai designs, they don’t feel derivative of Samurai. At least as non-derivative as you can get, this is Power Rangers after all. Continuing on the thread of character design, this issue has some great world-building. All of the background characters and the world they’re on are clearly alien but still feels familiar.  There’s a scene where a little girl presents Trini with a jar of “jellyflies” that she caught which are tiny, colorful jellyfish-like creatures. Details like that serve to deepen the world around our main characters and help breathe a bit of life into the story.

Necessary Evil has kicked off with a bang and is bringing some incredible ideas, new characters, and new themes to the table so while it might need to develop it’s storytelling a bit, the story at hand is insanely exciting, especially for an old school Mighty Morphin fan.