Tomb Raider (Top Cow) #0.5

by Dan Jurgens

This story of Lara's covers her first adventure. Questing for a legendary relic, Lara must stay alive long enough to make amends for an error from her past.

Genres: Comics

24 pages, Paperback

Published July 1, 2000

About the author

Dan Jurgens is an American comic book writer and artist. He is known for his work on the DC comic book storyline "The Death of Superman" and for creating characters such as Doomsday, Hank Henshaw, and Booster Gold. Jurgens had a lengthy run on the Superman comic books including The Adventures of Superman, Superman vol. 2 and Action Comics. At Marvel, Jurgens worked on series such as Captain America, The Sensational Spider-Man and was the writer on Thor for six years. He also had a brief run as writer and artist on Solar for Valiant Comics in 1995.

Reviews

[Adam · Rating 2 out of 5]

I've had the entire set of Tomb Raider comic books for a while now and I'm finally getting around to diving into some of them. Tomb Raider has gone through some wild revisions over the years and, in my opinion, they have been a real boon to the franchise. Now, a full confession on my part in order, I've never played these early games, so story-line wise this might be totally in order for the character. However, I've seen the movies, read a novel at this point, and played the newer games released for the Playstation 4 era, which I have enjoyed thoroughly. Part of the reason I never played these things is because I was massively into first person shooters and, at the time, found the whole third person view feel somewhat clunky. Fast forward to modern systems and I like third person as much as first person, so maybe I will go back in time and revisit these games.

Now, Tomb Raider came out in 1996 to much fan fair. My problem at the time is that I only had access to Macintosh computer and the games were never released for that system. So, I was severely limited in what games I could play at the time. The amusing part is that I once played the game Pitfall at a friends house and I remember us surmising at the time that it was a precursor to the Tomb Raider concept. Now, I'm not sure how much background story is given about Lara Croft, but when the comic books launched there wasn't much said originally. However, back in the 90's it was pretty common for a 1/2 issue to be released by Wizard Magazine if a title got popular enough. These often has special covers and a certificate of authenticity, which what my issue has.

In this 1/2 issue Dan Jurgens attempts to write a background story for Lara. All we knew from the original first four comics is that her parents and fiancé were killed in a plane crash, of which she was the sole survivor. Here we learn that Lara was on her way to becoming yet another spoiled trust fund rich girl, but when that plane crashed she was thrust into the wilderness to survive on her own. Andy Park's art aside, it's amusing to me that they put her in this snow covered mountain terrain and there are so many images of her just running around in shorts. In others she's got the bare midriff shirt and no jacket... it's just ridiculous. In retrospect, I am definitely spoiled by the more realistic grittier redesign of her character.

In any event, her experience changed her life and set her down the path of becoming the Tomb Raider she is today. It's actually a rather terrible story, because it shows her skirting her academics and being a lazy student. There is nothing about her love of history and academics, as if there's no way she could inherently have that interest because she is hot. Meanwhile, characters like Indiana Jones, who have their doctorate granted, but show great detail into their love of academics as well as the adventure of recovery of lost artifacts. Needless to say, this 1/2 issue, which I've read first did not pique my interest for hope in the writing of this series.

As far as as Parks art is concerned, I quite like it, but I'm certainly a bit biased having been raised on the likes of Gen 13 and Chaos Comics at this point. So the sexy femme fatale image has been rather burnt into me during my formative years. You can certainly level criticism at it, and I understand those, but this was comics in the 90's for me.

I actually rather prefer the background they laid out in the movies instead of going with whatever this was. This probably wasn't guided by the developer and her background story in the later games is much more palatable. For me, it would have been better if they had just thrown together a cool one shot artifact hung like they later did with issue 0, which I read following this one.

[Rangga Sukmawijaya · Rating 4 out of 5]

Komik ini menceritakan tentang sejarah Lara Croft hingga ia menjadi pemburu harta karun. Kehilangan orang-orang yang disayanginya, dan perjuangan untuk tetap hidup di alam yang liar membawa Lara ke saat yang paling menentukan dalam hidupnya.

[Neville Ridley-smith · Rating 2 out of 5]

Ooh err.
Ummmm, some of the shots and, shall we say, positions in this comic are a bit much.

It's like the editor is there saying "No, draw them bigger! No, even bigger!"

So yeah, but the story was kind of just ok.