3 out of 5

Man, volume three is a mess.  But hopefully Chris got it out of his system.

Here is something that Mr. Hastings hasn’t proven to be too great at: juggling storylines.  It crept into Volume 2, and I’ve seen evidence of it in some Marvel work he did over the past few years; his transitions just don’t feel natural, the “meanwhile, back at the ranch…” formula where you take storyline A as far as it can go, then switch to B and do the same, and back.  Instead, “meanwhiles” are seemingly just distributed by page count, or sometimes splitting a page in half so he can arrive at a shared conclusion around the same time.  So when McNinja sticks to a more streamlined format, the ridiculousness really gels, but otherwise, it interrupts the laughs too much to really flow.  There weren’t too many moving gears in Volume 2, but Volume 3 has a fuck-ton going on.  Embellishing this problem is the way the concept was approached: we literally have a chapter called “I told you that story so I could tell you this one.”  The ‘justification’ style of structure persists through more than a hundred pages, until Chris finally gets to where he’s going.  And then, yeah, it gets good.  But prior to that, everything reeks a bit too obviously of a weaving path just to get to the punchline.  Part of the charm of McNinja is how regularly all of the antics are presented, and so Operation Dracula! stumbles on that front, giant plot chunks never really gelling because they exist simply as stepping stones.  Running down the list – zombie ninjas, headless Ben Franklin, purgatory as a restaurant with poor service, ghost wizards, Dracula’s moon base – it sounds like business as usual, it just doesn’t read that way.

Still, you see three stars.  The book sits on the cusp of almost well enough such that you want to keep reading, and as things instantly start to improve once the pieces are in place, it chases away the earlier discomforts.  As with the step from Volume 1 to 2, Chris’ pencils (and Archer’s inks) keep improving, and it’s sort of a welcome return to form – also showing how far they’ve come in a few years – when the book drops grey tones for the last chapter.  The Benito Cereno extra is a bit pointless, but it’s an extra, so… something.

Volume Three is Chris’ really long-winded method of getting some jokes out of his system.  There are still classic McNinja moments and concepts, but the reading experience is definitely uneven.  Hastings has done a great job of building a weird world and a small cast to inhabit that world; keeping too many plot-plates spinning and then hastily taping them all together makes for a herky-jerky presentation in the writer’s hands, so hopefully the roundabout tale told in Operation Dracula! was a learning experience for Chris and volume four will benefit from it.