Comic tip: Pacific Rim – Tales from Year Zero

Recently I discovered a graphic novel which is kind of a prequel to the Pacific Rim movie, which I thought I'd share with you all for it's a great read. Pacific Rim - Tales from Year Zero was published in close collaboration with the movie's creators, which is great: some of its most important characters are in the graphic novel, and of course the Kaiju and Jaeger designs are very recognizable as well. Nevertheless, the writers used background stories to the movie that were never filmed, but were originally created to give more substance to the movie's universe. Thanks to this graphic novel, much of this unknown extra material is now available to us as well.

The graphic novel contains 52 pages of world-building short stories. I'm not going to summarize the stories, for that's near impossible without spoilers. What I can do however is give an example of the kind of background story you will get: the drifting phenomenon that we got to see in te movie - the neurological connection between two people and a Jaeger - is explained more elaborately in the graphic novel, for instance in the two panels below:

Still, every piece of background information is woven into a a real story, making it a true graphic novel, instead of, say, a compendium.

Recommendation

Even though this prequel is by no means essential to understanding the movie Pacific Rim, I'm genuinely recommending it to you. The stories are well-told with quality artwork and they really enhance your knowledge and understanding of this movie's world. Plus, they may be short stories, they still belong together as parts of a bigger whole.

In short, it's a great graphic novel, which I found worth the read. As a bonus, you get to enjoy the movie and it's characters a little longer! :-)

So what do you think, will you give this graphic novel a try? Let me know in the comment section below, or check out my blog Comics and Gadgets and share your thoughts there!