Review: RICK AND MORTY: NEW YEAR, NEW RICK SPECIAL #1

Overview

Rick Sanchez, eternal a**hole and pompous egomaniac, has made a New Year’s resolution to . . . be nice? But without Rick’s jerkiness to keep it at bay, the Cosmic Code Authority—a godlike being determined to make the universe as family-friendly as possible—starts to censor all of reality! It’s up to Rick to save the day (again), but it’ll come at the cost of abandoning his New Year’s resolution.

Our Take

It’s ironic that writer Christof Bogacs would do a whole tale about some agency that wants to censor reality because that isn’t unlike what the political extremes (both left and right) are often attempting to do but this issue only focuses on the conservative right’s censorship and not the conservative left’s attempt at doing the same thing. Moreover, most Oni Press releases are in-fact, censored, with no real mention of that anywhere so if you’re looking for a knockdown battle of censorship in the first Oni Press special release of 2025, you’re going to be disappointed.

We also get a whole bit about Rick helping Morty to pitch a TV series which is wild because the Rick and Morty TV series had an episode entitled “One Crew Over The Crewcoo’s Morty” that featured a premise where Morty pitched a heist film to Netflix and also featured a guest appearance by Elon Musk portraying “Elon Tusk”. One would think if a premise of a comic about censorship WERE to happen, that Elon Tusk would be more the antagonist rather than whatever the hell was trying to be attempted here given that Elon has since become the owner of one of the biggest social media companies in the world that he says was his way of making sure free speech was protected.

Even aside from all of the missed opportunities that Christof could’ve taken here to have a really strong one-off, the busy plot doesn’t really go anywhere nor does anything really land. It sucks too because the dialogue for the issue starts really funny and strong so I thought we were going to get something good here. Fortunately, Tony Gregori’s artistic wrist really works well here given his TMNT background and the number of animalistic characters presented this week. Unfortunately, none of this is strong enough to help out the terrible script.

Buy RICK AND MORTY: NEW YEAR, NEW RICK SPECIAL #1 here.