4 out of 5

Aw Yeah Comics guy Franco teams up with Scoot to… tell a tale that lasts beyond a few pages?  Indeed, the anthropomorphic cartoonish antics often arted / storied by Franco with Art Baltazar are visually fun and have a certain Archie-comic-eque punny simplicity to them, but it’s hard to justify reading more than a couple of issues when the gag is pretty much the same: cute characters for a few panels, then a punchline.  There’s no consequence, and it’s why, though I grew up reading Archie, I was content to reread my Digests over and over versus necessarily needing to read new stuff.  But the humor and energy are there, so it’s a joy to see that applied to a larger template: a mini-prestige (that may have started as a Kickstarter project?) put out by Action Lab comics.  Within, jetpack wearing dog-rogue Spot teams up with toupee-wearing robot Golly G for some adventuring: light thieving, dashery-doo, ninjas, monsters, and the like.  The best part, though, is that characters and plot actually evolve over the course of the pages, giving Spot and G (…waitaminute…) personalities that extend beyond yuk-yuks.  The art and color – Franco credited with breakdowns, Scoot with art (both on story) – is incredibly energetic, maintaining Franco’s learned comic timing but combined with a pleasing dash of action clarity and emotional expression that Scoot adds to the puzzle, and the colors are wonderfully bright while sticking to a general palette of blues and purples.

A lead-in story about a man named Moe Moe looking for the Spirit Star disappoints only because it’s very, very disconnected from the main narrative, and an early joke about Golly G wanting to be real that elicits four panels of laughter from Spot feels mean-spirited.  Like, not sure why it’s that funny, but maybe I’m just open to robot boys becoming real boys, who knows.

Otherwise, Spot on Adventure is fun, visually and script-ually amusing, and an appreciable application of Franco’s skills to a longer form story.