Jetsons #6 Wraps Mini With Beginnings of a Whole New World

The first thing to know when picking up JETSONS #6 is this: George Jetson is dead, having sacrificed his life doing a Bruce Willis in ARMAGEDDON to destroy a meteor on a collision course with Earth.

The other thing you need to know: It's not a meteor, and George Jetson is not dead.

As Jane, Elroy, and Judy gather for the last three minutes of Earth, they are shocked when the hurtling meteor comes to a dead stop outside the atmosphere. Inside, George is just as shocked to be floating in an empty space with his mother -- who is no longer Rosie the Robot but in her human body and about in her mid-thirties.

The crux of the crisis is that this is an alien craft, sent to stop a programmed seeding craft that went off course. Instead of inseminating a dead planet, it fell to Earth, killing billions as it did so and causing the oceans to rise -- thus why the people of the Jetsons' future live in floating houses. He's here because -- oops, sorry about the apocalypse, but let me make things better for you. Of course, to communicate this, he chews up a few pages of exposition, providing answers and backstory while the family sits enthralled with the tale of their new friend, who is so much more advanced on the evolutionary scale than they are. Everyone's awfully forgiving of the accidental genocide. Dark Phoenix should have got this kind of leeway.

Jimmy Palmiotti's "A Higher Place in the Stars" is an entertaining read, and Pier Brito's adaptation of the cartoon characters into a more realistic perspective is intriguing (although Elroy is a bit on the tall side. But overall, the story was missing a certain something -- the essence of the show that made THE JETSONS a comedy instead of a light-drama. The same mistakes were made with THE FLINTSTONES, which is why I gave up reading that one early on. There's promise here, to be sure, so I'm hoping another iteration of THE JETSONS is in our future, just to see if the minor course corrections can be put in and the series can finally blast off.