Regular Show #4

by KC Green, Allison Strejlau, Lisa Moore, Rachel Conner, & Josceline Fenton

Mordecai and Rigby return this month with issue four of Regular Show. This also marks the return of the format they used with issues one and two by having a longer main story that continues into the next issue, and throwing a small self-contained mini-tale at the end. This seems to be the more popular format for titles like Regular Show and Adventure Time, to reflect the types of short stories fans are used to from the television series.

The main story is Mordecai trying to fix a horrible haircut he received from Pops. You would think that Mordecai would have been smart enough by now to not accept any sort of service from the child-like Pops. Since this is just part one of probably a two part story, it leaves the reader hanging with Mordecai and his hair in a situation that may be even worse than just a bad haircut. This story did a great job with the art by replicating the look of the show but still had enough personality to feel fresh.  The story is decent but, as stated before, with accepting a haircut from Pops and some of the dialog, feels like they may have missed the mark on embodying the characters from the show.

The short story at the end suffered from similar problems. The art was spot-on with capturing that Regular Show style and the dialogue and characters were even a little better written than in the main story, but the plot itself was pretty transparent. Keep in mind, though,  that these books are aimed at a younger audience. Without spoiling anything, let’s just say this kind of story has been told before and plays out pretty predictably, but that doesn’t make it bad by any means; it was still cute and held true to the franchise.

This was a decent issue of Regular Show but not the best.  The problem could be that the first three issues were pretty diverse and eccentric which made this one seem tame, or even that, as a reader, you might expect more from a comic that just returned after a small hiatus. Most series always have ups and downs, especially when you do smaller arcs with established characters, so if this is the low point of this series then it’s actually doing pretty well. It will be worth checking the next issue just to see how crazy this barbershop is going to get.