Despite being about show business, Snagglepuss doesn’t have a lot of show. Whenever it comes time for drama, writer Mark Russell moves on. He gives penciller Mike Feehan and inker Mark Morales a couple panels to wrap up with visual suggestion, but no drama.
Considering Exit Stage Left reimagines Snagglepuss as a popular playwright in fifties New York City… some drama might be nice.
Russell’s script is intelligent, Feehan’s layouts are great, there’s just not a lot to the book. We meet Snagglepuss, get some of his ground situation, get some of the McCarthy hearings and its effects, but not much else.
When Huckleberry Hound shows up for a bit towards the end, it feels wrong. Russell has shied away from the cartoon origins of the character and having a guest star? It’s not smooth.
Exit Stage Left is off to an okay start. But, so far, there’s nothing special about it.
Despite being about show business, Snagglepuss doesn’t have a lot of show. Whenever it comes time for drama, writer Mark Russell moves on. He gives penciller Mike Feehan and inker Mark Morales a couple panels to wrap up with visual suggestion, but no drama.
Russell puts The Flintstones to bed with a summary of the human race (from the Great Gazoo). Turns out prehistoric Bedrock is a lot more like the 21st century than one might think. There’s a lot of story threads–Fred needs to win an important bowling game, his bowling ball is preparing to rebel against human oppression, Pebbles thinks maybe mystery god Gerald is bunk and science is real–plus some nods back to previous issues. Wilma doesn’t get anything, Betty gets less. It’s sort of manipulative, Russell knows all the right buttons to push, including the nostalgia ones (including mocking nostalgia ones), and Pugh’s art is wonderful as always. The Flintstones has been an interesting, not entirely successful, but often inordinately ambitious series. It’s been a fine time; a yabba dabba doo time, as it were.
Not the best issue of The Flintstones. Not the worst. Not the best though. Russell’s pretty wide with his jokes–hipsters, unpaid interns, vegan restaurants, neighborhood associations–all the stuff he’s referencing feels dated and he’s just doing it for filler anyway. The issue turns out to be all about Gazoo. Everything else is fluff. So clearly something went wrong somewhere with this one. But Pugh’s art is great; even though the style with the Gazoo sci-fi stuff is the same, it’s still sort of different. Pugh’s style changes just a little and it’s a neat perspective thing. Otherwise… it’s a bit of a yawner overall. More than half Russell’s jokes flop and he’s got a bunch of them.
Given “The Banana Splits” were a thing in the late sixties, some dated references in Suicide Squad/The Banana Splits Special might make sense. But writer Tony Bedard doesn’t go for sixties or seventies jokes; instead, it’s mid-nineties racial jokes. The Banana Splits reinventing themselves gangsta rap is far less problematic than when the cops are shooting at them because cops don’t care about “Animal Americans.” The editors of the book, who work on the far better Hanna-Barbera books, clearly don’t bring anything to those better books if they let that kind of crud through. Otherwise, it’s lame with mild amusements. Harley Quinn and the Elephant are cute. Ditto Killer Croc and the monkey (almost). Ben Caldwell and Mark Morales’s art is fine, but it’s not like it needs to do much.
Wilma gets a job, the mayor’s war-spending goes overboard, and Fred and Barney discover the cinema. It’s a meandering issue, but Russell touches on a lot. Pugh gets some great stuff to draw, there’s tragedy, there’s irony, there’s political commentary. It’s all kind of heavy too. Flintstones is always kind of heavy.