Comic Review: Rick and Morty #52

 

Overview:

In the first story, Morty narrowly escapes an exploding starship only to crash land alone on an alien planet.  Coming across the locals, Morty continues to get himself into life-threatening situations.  Through a series of lucky mishaps, he escapes death multiple times ending his day defeated and covered in alien blood.  He finally reaches the salvation of a city full of women that wish to praise him like a king and use him to impregnate all of their beautiful citizens.  It makes sense that this is the point when Rick shows up to bring him home.

The second story involves the garage being overrun by sentient garden gnomes.  As Rick puts Jerry and Morty to work to find the queen, he steps down into his lab for a moment.  Below, Rick runs into his janitor, Glootie, who tries to sell him his new app idea.

 

Our Take:

Many of you may be asking who Glootie is, and to be fair so were we over the last couple of weeks.  With season four of the show quickly approaching, a new line of Pop! figures were released ahead of San Diego Comic-con.  Included in the set was a brand new character, Glootie, who clearly is part of the new season, but his relevance is confusing.  Why would a random character get a new toy without an audience ever even seeing him before?  Well, Glootie was a topic that came up during the Rick and Morty panel at SDCC.  Justin Roiland and Dan Harmon not only confirmed that he plays a fun new role in the show, but they also showed an exclusive clip of the character while revealing that he is voiced by Thor: Ragnorak director Taika Waititi.

With that, all said, it was expected that the rest of us would need to wait until the new season is released to see Glootie in action.  Surprisingly, he was squeezed into the back story of this comic issue.  In all honesty, the story involving him is crap, if not non-existent.  It seems as if this little piece was deliberately made just to give us a peek at this little dude.  And, we do learn a couple of things.  For one, Rick admits that he is the one that imprinted the tattoo “Do Not Develop My App” on his forehead.  Second, he loves to try and sell his app ideas, as terrible as they are.  And, that’s about all the last few pages of the comic have to offer.  A little Easter egg on what’s to come.

Thankfully, where the second story lacked any plot at all, the first one was full of it.  Morty’s adventure through the lands of an alien world is a classic story of many characters exploring new lands.  Of course, the thing that separates Morty from other characters is his terrible luck.  A theme that runs through his story, he seems to be extraordinarily unlucky or lucky, but nothing in between.  And, of course, taking away his dream of losing his virginity at the end was the only logical conclusion.

This was not the strongest Rick and Morty comic that I’ve read.  I mean, my expectations are pretty high for this series, and rightly so.  Typically we get delivered original concepts and plots that make this book unique from everything else on the shelf.  Unfortunately, the first story was generic and predictable, while the second was more like a clip than a plot.  It almost feels like this whole book was thrown together pretty late, and a lot of this content was squeezed out at the last moment.  It’s fine, because this series does provide so much great reads, and the conversation of Glootie continues.