Comic Review: Adventure Time – The Bubbline College Special #1

OVERVIEW (SPOILERS)

While hanging with Jake, Prismo decides to peer into an alternate universe where Princess Bubblegum is a college freshman who starts a fiery romance with mysterious fellow student Marceline.

OUR TAKE

Well, this is an odd issue, not just because it’s the first Adventure Time comic of this current run that’s not part of the main series, but also because it inexplicably got delayed several times until it finally came out now, over a month and a half later. That was a bit annoying for me, but for others, it was apparently quite worth the wait, because there’s already reports of it being sold out across many comic shops. And it’s not hard to see why, as the coupling of Princess Bubblegum and Marceline is an immensely popular one, years before it was fully confirmed in the final regular episode of the Adventure Time cartoon. There’s been efforts to expand on this in canon material since the show ended, like the “Obsidian” episode of “Distant Lands”, and numerous references to it in “Fionna and Cake”, but the thirst of Bubbline shippers can never truly be quenched, so here’s this comic to try and get a few more bucks out of those who still yearn for their gummy vampire lovefest…and also like leaning into the fan fiction angle by just putting them in a new setting altogether and getting to see how these versions first meet and start to kindle their romance.

And in terms of completing that specific task, it does a pretty good job, I’d say. There’s all the expected romcom tropes, like the meet cute, the two hating each other at first, being put in a situation where they have to kiss and suddenly, the big kiss under a spotlight at the end, all that good stuff. If you just want more fuel for your own favorite Adventure Time ship, this will give you that in spades, though as a story in itself, it’s lacking a bit. The build up of this version of Bubblegum and this version of Marceline meeting and growing closer is done well enough, but it feels like it’s missing a bigger and more climactic ending. I’d say that maybe they could have made this a miniseries instead of a one shot, but this was also already double the size of a regular issue. Ah well, the people who wanted this will enjoy it, and that’s kinda all that matters for this issue. Hopefully they do some more alternative universe one shots in the future because this was a fun detour, though let’s see how the main series does in the next few issues first.