4 out of 5

I’d been looking for an excuse to read Mike Baron’s Badger and Nexus for a while, but with so many current books in my reading stack, finding the time to make it through a fairly expansive (and publisher / chronology wacky, from the sounds of it) back catalogue was low on my comic priorities.  A new series – published by a new rendition of the First Comics imprint! – fits the bill for that excuse.

I was still a bit cautious, mind you.  Liking this series meant committing to eventually taking that catch-up plunge, and besides – Mike Baron gets mentions here and there, but his titles aren’t generally brought up in the same context as “the greats” (whatever those are), so I needed to stay vigilant and not let my taste-makin’ sensibilities jump in head-first if the title just ended up being good and not great.

Well, it wasn’t great.  But it’s certainly better than good.  …And that doesn’t mean it’s in-between the two.  Rather – as I think I’m piecing together, reading Baron’s current Nexus newspaper strip as well – Badger splinters off onto its own plane of existence, and thus demands new standards for judgments.  Not yet equipped with a comparison point, my standards start here, and they would seem to be set pretty highly.

It took me a couple read-throughs of the first issue to see things through this new lens, though, because, without realizing it, I’d gone into the book expecting Badger to be certain things: Especially funny, or random, or, y’know, genius, and those expectations were confused by what I was instead reading.  It’s not that it’s not those things, it’s just that it’s exclusively… it’s own thing, which adds clarity to why it’s not often compared to Watchmen or the like, because it’s a different game.  The closest reference I can come up with is Howard the Duck / Steve Gerber, as both that title and writer had a tendency to just go with  bonkers setups, but even that comparison is off because Steve leaned into psychology and sociology, whereas Badger… is a comic book through and through.

Norbert Sykes joins the army and hangs out with his dog a lot.  When the dog dies during battle and Norbert is becomes a POW, his return to society is marked with a clear mental break – violence, talking to himself – and he’s soon institutionalized, where he’s diagnosed as a true multiple personality, one of which happens to be martial arts master Badger.  Inside, he meets the centuries old wizard Ham, dejected ruler of the North, who’d like to hire Badge to protect him from demons while he resurrects extinct animals to use their blood to foil some power usurping plans being fiddled with by other wizards.  Got all that?  Here’s the catch: Baron certainly isn’t above playing it goofy, but the book works as much more than a gag because, on the whole, he plays it straight.  Like: What’s a ridiculous narrative?  Now let’s try to write it like a serious story.  …And it works!  Norbert’s isolation and mental descent during the war is actually affecting, and the action – ridiculous fights between yetis and a cartoon-esque damage absorbing Badger – is actually exciting, and the story – though it jumps through a ton of hoops too quickly, requiring the issues pre-summary to really know what’s going on – well, once you do know what’s going on, it’s pretty dang interesting.  …And fun!

Jim Fern’s issue 1 art is fairly stiff but defines the characters well, and Paul Mounts colors seem to hide the fluidity of the art a bit behind his color flats (issue 4s ‘Challenging Comics’ colors help the art pop in comparison), but Tony Akins’ issue two work is really active, and then were treated to three issues of Val Mayerick, who does a great job wrangling many absurd situations.

So, alas, I have no previous Badger knowledge to tell you how this stacks up.  But that means I didn’t have that bias (or perhaps a less favorable bias) as well, and I still emerged from this five issue run wowed by its true uniqueness, and the energy the original writer was able to imbue in a character some twenty years old.  I hope the material did make the older fans happy, because, yeah, now I’ll be going back and reading those archives… presumably returning with the same hope that Badger has enough modern day support to keep Baron putting out more.