Adventure Time #29

By Ryan North, Jim Rugg & Whitney Cogar

OH MY GLOB! It’s Adventure Time! Adventure Time #29 reunites us with all of our favourites: Jake, Finn the Human and Princess Bubblegum, but somehow it feels overdone in this latest release. The acronyms, nicknames and general friendliness and laid back attitude the characters in Adventure Time have for each other all feel genuine. But in #29, they just seem over used; like the writers were trying to bring in a wider audience to an already great franchise. A great idea, but a little late if you’re doing that in issue #29. Adventure Time is a great series with endless spin-offs, satires of itself and gender reversals, but this issue just seems to pander to its already captive audience.

The art, you of course can’t go about reviewing an Adventure Time book without touching on its normally stellar, colourful and unique art and colour styles. BUT, and it pains me to do so, just like the story, the art in Adventure Time #29 leaves something to be desired. It gives the appearance of something that was done in a minimalist Adventure Time style, but the art is part of the blood and soul of these characters and story, to mess with that is to mess with the very essence of Adventure Time. In the first, main story, there’s not a lot of colour, lines are shaky and then as you read on in to the multiple stories in the book, the art becomes more colourful but also a lot more blocky and linear. There’s too much variance, not enough attention to the characters details but the environments and backgrounds / buildings are very well done and kept to the heart of what Ooo should look like.

The plot was all over the place: first they’re dead, but not really dead, then something to do with science and ghosts… it was all just too much that seemed to tried to smush everything fans of Adventure Time like into one issue. Hopefully #30 will pick up some of the pieces that this issue through around. That being said, as a HUGE fan of Adventure Time, this was not only hard to read but this review was very hard to write.