LSP and Tree Trunks go on a treasure hunt! Good thing Finn and Jake are there to save the day... or are they?
It’s the most important moment of Lumpy Space Princess’s life, and it’s all going to slip through her fingers if she doesn’t get help. Tree Trunks comes out of her mystery filled retirement for one last job as she agrees to help LSP on a wild west treasure hunt. Finn and Jake secretly follow along to protect their friends but discover that LSP knows more than she is letting on about this particular treasure...
Josh Trujillo (Love Machines) and Zachary Sterling (Adventure Time) take readers on a wild journey in Adventure Time: Brain Robbers.
Although I do not know the insides and outs of Adventure Time, any time I get the chance to watch the show on Cartoon Network, I am just enthralled by the surreal and hilarious adventures of Jake the Dog and Finn the Human, thus having a good enough knowledge of who the characters are and the kingdoms where they are based. As someone who doesn’t usually read comic tie-ins to popular cartoons, I thought to give this graphic novel a go.
This entry in the Adventure Time Original Comic lines focuses mainly on Lumpy Space Princess and Tree Trunks in a wild west quest for vengeance, neither of which are my favorite characters nor my favorite setting, though as always the creators do a great job at recreating the feeling of the cartoon in the comics and delving into some interesting new genres. Check out more AT ephemera I've been going through at Reading Rainstorm.
A little adventure mostly about LSP and Treetrunks looking for treasure. There's some of Adventure Time's trademark ridiculous humor, but not quite enough. That in combination with the focus these two side-characters made for an average book.
We get to visit the Ooo version of the wild wild west along with LSP and Treetrunks this time. Searching for fortune, tarantulas, and brains is what this issue focuses about. And creepy lych kids, too.
Warning: Read this book before sharing it with your kids. Adventure Time delights in its surrealistic elements, but there is a darkness that can be present in the show as well. This can manifest in the melancholy that plagues a lot of the characters--Bubblegum and her responsibility to her subjects mixed with her need for control, Marceline's complicated past with the Ice King, even the Ice King himself--or in the horror elements that are peppered throughout the series--the peak manifestation being the Lich. This OGN mixes Halloweeny images of horror with the surrealistic logic of the series in a way that I really enjoyed, but also found a touch unnerving. A character is imagined as being rebuilt and stitched together from different parts, and the image comes as a real shock both narratively and visually. It's not cartoony like the rest of the book which makes the moment all the more jarring. Which is to the writer and artist's credit--they use the form to make what's supposed to be an unnerving scene truly unnerving--but this is also a kids' book. I really enjoyed this and loved the mix of the absurd and the frightening, but I'll probably wait to pass this along to my 7 year-old nephew for another year. If you have kids, give this volume a quick read-through before sharing it. Because it carries the brand of a kids' show, the assumption is that it's kid-safe, but every kid is different and this book features a nest of spiders hatching from a character's eye socket. It works within the logic and story of the book, but you know that's going to be some kid's nightmare fuel. So give it a quick glance first. It won't take you long and you'll know real quick if it'll be okay.
Tree Trunks and LSP plan a heist in a Western-themed stretch of Ooo, but then Finn gets his brain stolen by zombies while shadowing them, and also there’s a whole bit with tarantulas in a skull, and meanwhile Sweet P is giving Mr Pig a glimpse of cosmic horror…this is almost too full of ideas, but then that’s a pretty good look for Adventure Time.