Three of those five phrases give chills or can (and certainly do in conjunction with one another) while one of them seems a little odd. Hanna-Barbera. But then you look at Future Quest and there’s nothing better looking than Shaner illustrating the Florida swamp playground of Jonny and Hadji. They’re flying around on jetpacks and bantering. It should be amazing and it does look amazing and it’s certainly all right, but Parker’s script for Future Quest is more competent than inspired. He’s teaming up Hanna-Barbera cartoon characters in a DC comic with Shaner and Rude art. He succeeds. But there’s nothing else to Future Quest.

So is it worth the price of admission for wholly competent scripting and glorious artwork? Sure. It’s got a lame, shoehorned hard cliffhanger and I’m a little perplexed why they teamed Shaner and Rude. Their styles for the book are near identical, so was it because Shaner had too many pages to do? Did Rude really want to do some talking heads? Because not much happens this issue. There’s a little bit of action, some sci-fi exposition stuff, character setup, but not much else. There’s no character development. It’s sort of sad to think of how well Parker can do a hodgepodge team book and then there’s this erstwhile event comic with a hodgepodge team and no connection with it.

Jeff Parker. Doc Shaner. Steve Rude. Those creator names are magical. But Future Quest isn’t magical, even though it’s got a lot of the right ingredients to be magical. It’s hard not to be a little disappointed. Especially considering how much better it might be if the characters actually had time to bond and truly interact, instead of move from set piece to set piece.