3 out of 5

Of Axe Cop, Ethan Nicolle had commented that the strip would essentially stop when younger brother – and scripter – Malachai was no longer having fun making it, as the stories and characters were arrived at during goof around sessions between the two brothers.  A smart way to approach what’s essentially a flashlight on the loose (and endlessly inventive) logic of young minds, and to keep the material “honest.”

The hitch there is that Malachai might still be having fun at some point – say when he’s 8 years old, at the time of President of the World – but the reader might not be, or at least, not as much as before.

Which seems like such a horrible knock against a kid, but it’s not meant to be denigrating his creativity or ‘writing,’ as Axe Cop has never been a traditionally ‘written’ strip, it’s more just to note that, like, we get older.  And even from 5 to 8, the world starts to look different, and our sense of humor shifts.  President of the World is still littered with little hilarious one-off tidbits – Axey Smartist, now the titular Prez, uses a time-travel portal and a create-anything pencil to defeat the Evil plots of Evil bad robots and Evil aliens and the zombies and bad guys they create – but it also has a new ‘cap’ on its randomness.  Between the lines, once can sense the real world infringing a bit on Malachai’s thoughts, turning a complete absence of reality into awareness of DNA, with charmingly overkill axe-to-the-head battle cries replaced with threats of people getting stabbed to death.  That’s not as grimdark as it sounds, just indicative of a kid being a bit more influenced by whatever he’s seen and heard in the intervening years.

What this means is that Axe Cop vol. 4 survives more off of Ethan’s artistry this time, which is up to the task of hilariously visualizing the impossible with great comic timing.  Malachai’s Goo Cop and dumb aliens might not have the same zing as Flute Cop or Dinosaur Soldier, but they’re amusing enough to suffice for three issues of silliness, and despite my overly critical take on things above, the Axe Cop experiment in encouraging his creativity does promise great things for the kid, as the ending he tacked on to this thing is pretty damn genius.