3 out of 5

Hm, but not berserk enough.

Promising to delve into thr heart of Badge’s madness, Mike Baron spun up a mini-series – with an ongoing plot! – at the tail end of a run of quite excellent (and hilarious) issues in the Badger ongoing.  The juxtaposition of proposed semi-seriousness to the recent uptick in ridiculousness was intriguing, and I’m sure brought to mind hopes of exploring some of the mostly untouched psychological themes introduced way back in those initial Badger issues.

And to be fair, the series does explore those themes.  But it also doesn’t really do much with it, using the setup – Badger’s stepfather returns, triggering a psychic break and the resurgence of all of Badge’s multiple personalities – to lead up to a “reveal” that, frankly, I had already assumed, and I can’t have been alone in that.  To not put too fine a point on it: we already know Badger suffered some type of abuse at the hands of his stepfather as a youth; here we get filled in on the forms that abuse sometimes took.  Which does give us some clipped summaries as to how certain personalities manifested, but it also shortchanges so much more: by only delving one level deep into the family drama, Badge’s belt-whipping pappy and permissive mom are reduced to one-dimensional tropes.  And then there’s the distraction of why Larry – the stepfather – has returned in the first place: a fittingly (for Sykes kin) bonkers plan to seed white power attack dogs across the nation (trained by his communicates-with-animals son, Badger, naturally) in order to kick off a full-on race war.  This is the kind of over the top anarchy that works really well in the main series, but applying it to the meatier background stuff makes both sides of the tale uneven.

Visually, things are a wacky good time: employing a different artist per Badger-personality, even down to the panel, we get a four issue artistic jam from a cadre of quality aesthetes.

Doing a wholly dry Badger mini-series wouldn’t have felt right, but Badger Goes Berserk could have dug deeper in other ways, keeping the book’s light touch while staying focused on its leads’ fascinating psychological makeup.