This series, yet another licensed title from Boom! Studios, starts immediately as the movie ends and the President--already a bit fragile from his a-number-one ordeal in New York--plays the wrong tape, switched out by Snake Plissken. While the President revokes Snake's pardon with the ink still wet on it, Snake is able to commandeer a helicopter and escape, before getting shot down on his way to Canada. That was a misdirect to cover his tracks, although the rank-and-file soldiers both have no gripe with him and a healthy fear of him, and aren't trailing him that hard. He starts hitchhiking and making his way south, eventually catching a ride with a batch of culty-nuts on their way to Florida. Snake is unimpressed, but Florida had basically seceded six years prior (that would've been 1991, Escape took place in 1997!) and was now run by twin boys who allegedly had powers.
The cultists get overly violent, forcing Snake and a girl to make their escape. He's maybe game for going anywhere the U.S. isn't, so maybe Florida can't be all bad...even if they've planted nukes along their northern border, like they could blow them up and "float away." I feel like I've seen that somewhere before...
But, to enter the state, you have to go through "the crucible," as they only want "useful, productive members of society." Although he fights his way through those tests easily enough, the blasé Snake still faces death for noncompliance with the "job assignment officer," but is saved by the Twins...who maybe want to kill him themselves for their rep.
The America in this series is broken in more modern ways than New York (or Los Angeles) had been in the movies; but it's not a country or a world in great shape either way. Snake is recognized all the time, and would doubtless be a folk hero if he gave half a crap, or wasn't usually presumed dead. And the girl this issue bucks the trend by ditching pretty quickly, but in the issues I've read, just like the movies, traditionally anyone befriending, teaming up with, or hanging around Snake for any extended period of time ends up extra-dead. Also: probably more smoking than any two dozen comparative books!
I got the first four issues recently--all signed! But the series ran for maybe sixteen issues, presumably building up to Escape from L.A., a moderately enjoyable movie that I hated the ending of! Snake basically sends the human race back to the stone age; too bad for you if you were in an iron lung or dialysis or on a plane or anything. This series makes it seem like the common people wouldn't have had nice things like that by then anyway; so he was maybe doing more good than harm. Maybe.
Huh. I'd forgotten how that one ended as I tend to remember the 1st movie more than the sequel.
ReplyDeleteI wonder if Russell has one one more Snake Plissken movie in him. An Old Man Plissken movie if you will, where he's just as surprised as the rest of us that he's still alive after all these years and just as miserable you'd expect.
I'm surprised they haven't already made a horrible reboot of that franchise yet. Not that I would ever wish that to happen, but we all know how Hollyweird is these days, so it just seems inevitable.