Nightmare Rarity and her shadow creatures overpower the ponies, while Luna is sent back to help Ponyville prepare for the upcoming invasion. The Mane Six are locked up, with only Spike left free. He sneaks into the castle, but is caught in an illusion of Nightmare Rarity's. He manages to see through the deception, but is unable to fight back against the corrupted Rarity. Now all that's left are the ponies on earth. And only one issue left to go in this story.
The Review
There's something about fart jokes that, no matter how innocuous or how only one is used in an entire issue, the simple fact that one was made lowers the esteem many readers have for the entire work. I don't really take it into account when considering my grade for this issue, but it did give me pause when I read it. "Really?" I thought, "We're going there?"
Other than that, it seemed like this issue was shorter than the past few issues have been. Though I think that's something that has been plaguing the current creative team. And in fact I find that in general a lot of comics are moving towards fewer panels per page with more emphasis on the art and larger artistic layouts.
I bring this up because I've been spending the past week reading through Don Rosa's backlog of Donald Duck comics. The reason this is relevant is because Rosa has a very specific style where every single panel is not only packed with information, but he also packs an extra four panels in per page compared to his peers. Which already at the time had more panels than current comics do. This meant that he cold tell much longer stories in much less space. More than once I'd be into a story and look back at how many pages I'd read and realize I was only on the second page. I think more comics could take a page out of Rosa's book and pack their panels just a little more densely. It's tricky to do, and unless the artist is up to the task it won't look good. But considering how much more story this would give us per month I think this is a style that more artists and writers should consider adopting.
That's my main opinion of this month's comic. It was good, but we've gotten a lot of good, and to really make an impact we need phenomenal. Otherwise we're just left with a good story that we're being given in smaller chunks than is really necessary. Just a little more content per month and I think we'd be doing a lot better.
Still, I've enjoyed this run, if not quite as much as the first storyline, and I'm interested to see how this all wraps up next month. If nothing else, the comic series has been a blessing for fans of the show, providing at least a bit of new content. It's good, but not great, and I think just a little more effort would help improve this creative team's work significantly. But, I'll refrain from commenting on the story as a whole until next month.
The Grade
3/5
If you liked the review, consider picking up the trade:
My Little Pony Volume 1: Friendship Is Magic
0 comments:
Post a Comment