The drivers all eat mushrooms and flashback to “The Butcher Shop,” where they got their abilities or cloned or resurrected or whatever. Pontac’s enthusiastic enough but he doesn’t have enough content. Manco’s art is, of course, fantastic and carries most of the issue. While thin, it’s amiable.

It’s the first issue of Wacky Raceland I don’t really care about. The racers end up in post-apocalyptic Las Vegas–complete with a comb-over gang fronted by someone wanting to put up a wall to protect Vegas–and one of them gets the rest in trouble. Will the cars, which talk into the same colloquialisms as the Vegas gang members, be able to save their racers.

The idea of the cars talking to each other, which I don’t remember from any other issues but maybe I wasn’t paying enough attention, is pretty cool. Unfortunately, it’s a lot cooler than anything the regular cast does in the issue. They get captured, they have to fight gladiator-style, Manco’s art is great. But there’s no momentum to the issue–the Vegas trip is shore leave, basically, and there’s not enough character development to make it matter. So it’s just a pause.

If it weren’t for Manco’s art, this issue wouldn’t have anything going for it. It’d be fine, I suppose, it just wouldn’t be worth reading. Not the place to be for the fourth issue. Hopefully Pontac’s got some better ideas on the horizon.

Once again, I’m left a little perplexed by Wacky Raceland. It’s still not wacky, unless they’re trying to rebrand “wacky” as something out of a Mad Max movie, which would make sense. Wacky Raceland feels like corporate synergy on overdrive but it doesn’t matter because writer Pontac’s ideas are engaging enough. Oh, and because Leonardo Manco’s art is awesome. There’s not a lot of original design, just good execution of the standards for post-apocalyptic societies with old cars. Lots of examples for that setting.

And Pontac does try to build the characters. He has a pattern now–a few characters get a story, the other ones fight well-drawn but a little too obscure monsters, then things wrap-up. Every issue is kind of a done-in-one.

This issue’s character is some girl who ran away from a bad situation and things went even worse because of the apocalypse. Manco does that story as a Greek fable. It’s not successful. It’s well-intentioned, but it’s not successful.

But it barely slows the comic down just because of the momentum Pontac and Manco work up in the rest of it. Wacky Raceland’s a cool comic.

Wacky Raceland continues to be a zany, antisocial, mildly disturbing wondrous mess. There’s action all over the place, but Manco keeps it all in check. It’s like he can do wild, but it’s contained wild. It’s the perfect mix.

But Pontac comes through on the story too. He’s got this depressing, awful flashback into one of the racers’ pre-apocalypse lives. Turns out being sympathetic to the characters might be a mistake. This issue’s flashback is for Dick Dastardly and it’s part of the main story instead of a back-up. It works better this way; it makes Pontac have to do expository about the setting and it means Manco gets to draw different things in combination with one another. Manco has a very classical style and his uniform application of it–sci-fi and horror, for example–brings disparate visual elements beautifully. It’s fun to look at Wacky Raceland. It’s well done, but it’s also fun to see this stuff.

There’s also the Hanna-Barbera element. You never take Wacky Raceland too seriously, you never worry about some development being a disappointment. It’s a prime gig as far as reader expectation (if it were bad, it’d be the reader’s fault for buying it–come on, DC doing grim and gritty Hanna Barbara titles), but Pontac and Manco are still doing a great job with it.

I’m going to make a bold statement.

Wacky Raceland is the best soulless corporate synergy comic book of all time. I’m not sure how many serious competitors it has, because for this kind of corporate synergy you need a comic book company–DC–another company to license properties from–Hanna-Barbera–and another company with some kind brand reference–Warner Bros. Wacky Raceland is a Warner Bros. subsidiary mash-up, with writer Ken Pontac and artist Leonardo Manco not referencing a Hanna-Barbera cartoon, but instead bring Mad Max to comic books. Mad Max: Fury Road being a Warner Bros. film. And, you know, Warner owns DC.

So it’s synergy.

And it’s soulless, right? It has to be soulless. Wouldn’t it be amazing if it weren’t? Wouldn’t it be amazing if instead of just being really cool, somehow Pontac actually conveys an important storyline. I don’t think it’ll happen, but what if it did. It’d be amazing. But it’s already amazing. Does it need to be more amazing? Is there a place for purely entertaining entertainment, where the artistry is in how digestibly involving the material reads or plays?

I mean, Manco’s art is phenomenal. I’ve always liked him, but he juggles a lot of intentionally contrasting visualize styles and he rocks the Grim and Gritty Hanna-Barbera apocalypse. If DC’s Hanna-Barbera move is meant to answer Afterlife with Archie and other inventively done “pop culture” series, Raceland is the first sign they might have the secret weapon–enough pop culture properties, brands and icons to overwhelm the competition.

And Pontac’s essential here too. Because Raceland is a lot all at once. Pontac concentrates on making the story pleasing to read before anything else. He’s got a great pace to the endless dialogue, which is almost never expository.

It’s kind of awesome. If only Pontac could come up with a cliffhanger. He fails. But then there’s a cool backup where they riff on The Revenant. Because pop culture awareness is important and this book gets it. It’s great entertainment.