Comic Review: Adventure Time #11-12
OVERVIEW (SPOILERS)
Finn and Jake follow Robot Finn’s trail of chaos to the Fire Kingdom, where he apparently stole the crown of the Fire Queen, Flame Princess’ late mother, and now Flame Princess is seeing red! Well, more than usual. Meanwhile, Marceline takes drastic measures to take Ice King’s Crown from him and possibly bring back Simon. It all leads to a big brawl on the beach where the true culprit is revealed!
OUR TAKE
We’re back after a long self imposed delay to wrap up this story arc of the Adventure Time comic! And I wish I had better things to say about it but what we end up getting is pretty blow par, even for this comic run. For one, the art style for these two issues seems to just kind of devolve into not much more than scribbles, to the point it is actually a little tough to tell what is going on at times. Like I know that Adventure Time is a zany sort of story, but even the first couple arcs of this comic knew that that they needed to stay on model with the characters. It’s even worse for Ravine, Billy’s daughter who is original to this comic, who gets the worst of it. Computer Princess thankfully doesn’t seem to have this problem, but it still makes for a bit of a struggle in following the visuals. The two plots are perfectly fine at least, with the main one being about Finn and Jake trying to get Robot Finn to stop stealing shit, while the B plot is Marceline trying to get through to Simon in Ice King’s janked up head. And while the latter is dealing with heavier and more dramatic material, the aforementioned art style really undercuts that by making it seem more childish. I’ve seen child like drawings be used for dramatic and even creepy stories, but this isn’t the way to do that.
Still, we do find by the end of the arc that the two seemingly disparate plots are actually very much connected, as Robot Finn was being controlled by the wacky trickster Magic Man, who in turn reveals that he is working for Betty, Simon’s estranged wife who is apparently living on Mars since Simon was fully absorbed by the Ice King persona. Well, I say “work for” but it sounds like he’s actually trying to flirt and impress her, which she seems all to happy to take advantage of. This comic’s different continuity is really doing a speed run of a whole lot of Adventure Time plots that took up basically the entire ten season and eight year run of the TV show, so I wonder when they’re going to start branching out and doing their own thing. But regardless, it looks like the Betty and Magic Man stuff will be followed up on in the very next arc, beginning later this month! And lucky you, you’ll be getting the review for that this month also! Like it really should be anyway!
