On The Cheap: Get Waid & Samnee’s ‘The Rocketeer: Cargo Of Doom’ For Four Bucks

This week at Comixology, IDW has a sale on miniseries collections, and there's a lot of good stuff in there to check out. You can grab Walt Simonson's Star Slammers, for instance, or check out Kurt Busiek and Stuart Immonen's all-too-short Shockrockets and get bummed out about how it was only a miniseries all over again. If, however, you're looking for the best way to spend four bucks, then there's one story that you need to set your sights on: The Rocketeer: Cargo of Doom.

Originally released in 2012 as part of IDW's first big push to return Cliff Secord to pulpy, high-flying adventures, Cargo of Doom comes courtesy of Mark Waid and Chris Samnee --- a team you've probably heard of --- and features the Rocketeer battling against an entire ship-load of dinosaurs, a premise that results in one of the single best comic book panels ever published.

Believe me, I rarely imagine anything else.

To be honest, my initial guess as to what that cargo might be was that it was Dracula, with the mysterious ship and a crew speaking in hushed tones about a "master" in Waid and Samnee's riff on the Count's arrival in London on the Demeter back in the original novel. But to be fair, I always suspect that every story involves Dracula until proven otherwise, and if there's one thing that can take the sting out of being wrong about it, it's dinosaurs.

As for where they actually come from, the big reveal of the source of the dinosaurs --- the dinosource, if you will --- is not just clever, it's exactly in tune with what Dave Stevens did in his original Rocketeer stories, tying Secord and company back to the pulpy legacy of characters like Doc Savage and the Shadow, building this big tapestry of old-school heroes that added an entire new level of fun to it.

If you've enjoyed those original stories, then you'll get a kick out of the action, adventure, romance and dinosaurs of Cargo of Doom, and getting the entire series for $3.99 --- the cover price of a single issue of the series when it was coming out --- is pretty irresistable.