Darkwing Duck: Duck Knight Returns
That cloaked avenger making a blazing comeback to protect his crime-plagued city is not the Batman of The Dark Knight Returns (1986) but a masked mallard meant to evoke him: Darkwing Duck, returning to the mean streets after a year of living the quiet life and raising his action-starved daughter, Gosalyn. Dragged from retirement, he reunites with mechanic and gadget-man Launchpad to go up against an array of former villains and—much more interestingly—the mind-control plans of megacorporation Quackworks and its army of crimebots. Darkwing has the ornery, beleaguered perseverance of another great cartoon duck—Daffy, of course. The slick color and expressive cartooning has as much to offer as the original mid-’90s animation where the character began, and the anticorporate theme is age-appropriate and welcome (though somewhat suspicious given that the property is owned by Disney). Ultimately, though, the concept is a bit too derivative to function as more than a fine pastime between issues of Boom! Kids' truly excellent adaptations of The Incredibles and The Muppet Show. Grades 3-5. --Jesse Karp