5 out of 5

Here’s that Badgey I fell in love with: puns; Abbott and Costello dialogue; suddenly breathless and bloody action; a seat-of-its-pants plot that nonetheless feels perfectly logical; stakes and sudden un-stakes and stakes again swapped out without hesitation.  There also might be some humorous jabs from Baron at his readership who frequently critique in letters about the lack of ongoing plot elements, for Here Come Some Cameos From The Past!  …And it’s handled with such slick wit and scripting as to be legitimately surprising.  I mean, you never really know where Baron is going, so it’ll always be surprising, but these were still some nice nods and inclusions.

Directly following on the Grand Master storyline, Badger’s defeat of intended participants in the every-hundred-years Tournament of the Lotors triggers his own invite.  The winnings?  Any wish you want!  Ham asks Badger to ask for world domination.  Sure, Larry!  And Badge is off on his whims, meeting the like-minded Mavis Davis on the flight over, kicking off one of the most fun road-trip romances to e’er have been kindled on comic pages.

The trek to the tournament is fraught with scuffles with folk who don’t want Badger to participate, and he and Mavis take them out with due force, illustrated with febrile energy by Bill Reinhold.  Bill inking his own art can look cluttered in the regular book, but whether it was diverted focus for this GN or having more space (the First graphic novels were magazine-sized), his loose style just translates really well on the page – all of Norbert’s and Mavis’ varying emotions and the wild choreography are clear and expressive; Ray Murtaugh’s colors do an equal amount to balance this, though, wringing the most out of each page without over-saturating.  …Willie Schubert admittedly gets a little lost with the letters sometimes, with some odd bubble placement, but Badger’s loosey-goosey scripting style works okay with that.

As Baron has been bouncing from sort of average tale to average tale in the ongoing at the time this was written, it’s almost like he was saving up his best Badger inspirations for Hexbreaker.  Or maybe it was a fortunate sequence of events.  Who knows?  Who cares?  The result is the perfect distillation of the character.