For those who missed out, there was a line of Power Rangers comics put out for a couple years by a company called PaperCutz, who mostly specialize in family-friendly comics. Nothing too risqué, but at the same time, somewhat toned down from the usual comic fare. They mostly did a handful of comics based on the current run of series (Samurai, Megaforce), but eventually got around to doing a couple MMPR comics before the license expired earlier this year.
I found myself with a copy of the MMPR book that they put out earlier this month as part of the Free Comic Book Day event. It’s a story that takes place during the 2-part White Light episode, shortly after Tommy became the White Ranger. By Bug… Betrayed involves Lord Zedd turning Billy’s Rad Bug into a monster because… sure, why not? We also have a subplot of Zack explaining the joys of collectables to Kimberly (no doubt catering to the speculative market who collects these things, grades them, displays them, and does nothing of significance with them), and we also get a shot of Trini almost getting run over by a car… which garnered some negative reaction due to the scene being in poor taste.
For those who don’t recall, the actor who played Trini in MMPR – Thuy Trang – lost her life in a car accident… and pray that the people decrying this in bad taste did not write fanfics that parlayed that real life tragedy into a plot point of their unoriginal narrative… though, for what it’s worth, when I still wrote fanfics, Trini was still very much alive… but I digress.
(2026 Update: They eventually edited the panel so that Kimberly was the one who nearly got run over… in the digital releases, anyway. This one sequence is why Boom didn’t include the issue in their MMPR Archives collections.)
Anyway, it’s a book aimed for the little ones, so naturally the whole thing is dumbed down considerably. The story, while a bit silly, isn’t outside the norm of MMPR – see Season 3’s Follow That Cab, for example – but the dialogue is what gets me. A couple minor errors (Skull is called Spike, wrong Zord calls) and some rather cringe stock words that I can’t imagine any of the actors speaking. Even the artwork feels a bit lacking here. It’s clean looking, the costumes, monsters, and zords look fine… but the teens only bare passing resemblances to the actor who played them – you’ll recognize the hair, but not so much the faces.
Part of me wonders if this was originally intended to be either a Samurai or Megaforce book, but then someone decreed that we need MOAR MMPR and we got this. PaperCutz did put out a couple of MMPR comics, but if they’re anywhere close to the quality of this, I’m probably going to skip on those. Sorry.
dtm666 