Comic Review: Rick and Morty – The Manga Vol. 2
OVERVIEW (SPOILERS)
Morty continues his battle in the Mechab against the threat of Jiants, but finds himself buckling against Rick’s mysterious orders and plans.
OUR TAKE
The manga but not a manga (since it’s not right to left) adaptation of Rick and Morty reaches its…conclusion? I’m not seeing any indication of there being a third installment but this volume doesn’t conclude anything. If anything it leaves a massive threat unresolved. Thankfully this has no connections to the Rick and Morty The Anime that I’ve not watched and has not gotten great reviews, but I might end up watching it just to be a completionist. As for this, it’s basically Rick and Morty surrounded by pastiches of popular anime, most prominently Evangelion and Attack on Titan, but unlike that one Voltron parody episode, it feels like the involvement of these references isn’t just skin deep, as characters like Rick, Summer, and Beth map on pretty well to their equivalents in Evangelion, while seeing a bunch of misshapen naked clones of Jerry, the Jiants (basically the Titans but with Jerry’s head), is actually pretty funny to see. But even as effective and thought out this parody is, it feels like it is parody forward first and story second. And that kind of joke would probably hold up for a single, self-contained volume, but a second seems to make it a bit of a drag at that point.
These are basically the limitations of not just having an ambiguously canon supplementary material spin-off. It’s not gonna matter to the main thing it’s based on that most people are going to be aware of, and it’s not helped much by the fact that it exists to follow up on a gimmick of a totally separate ambiguously canon thing that also doesn’t matter and isn’t well liked. This exists as a manga parody because of The Anime that is technically an anime, and this could very well end up being the better written of the two (again I haven’t seen The Anime), but it still exists primarily to say “hey here’s Rick and Morty and friends in a vaguely manga art style in black and white and referencing some anime that people know” instead of having something to really say about any of the subject matter involved or anything about the characters involved. And with things unresolved and Oni Press no longer making Rick and Morty comics, it will probably just exist as an odd novelty of that era like the D&D comics or the Vindicators spin-off book. So ultimately, it’s fine as a product but probably not something you’ll feel the need to seek out unless you really have to.
