2 out of 5

It’s colorful.

While I wait for the hopeful return of Frank Gibson to the pages of a Gumball ongoing, I make a purchase like this, and realize it’s absolutely the creator and not the characters fueling the funny.

Grab Bag is a mix of shorts and pin-ups by some familiar Boom! / Kaboom! faces – Zach Giallongo, Kate Leth – some names I don’t recognize, and a page of ads by Yehudi Mercado, which are still, unfortunately, showing that his gift for acerbicly-tinged humor may have run out in favor of straight pun stuff.  The shorts range between okay – The Collection by Fernanda Jaber and Fellipe Martins – and questionably unfunny, like the anti-climactic or perhaps just conclusionless Funland Fiasco by Philip Murphy.  There are two Phil Murphy bits, actually, and they are garish to look at: mega compressed panels and text, like shrunk to 80% of intended size to fit the page.  Re-formatted web material, maybe?

The pin-ups are – no offense to the artists – nothing special.  But then again, I’m not sure I believe in pin-ups nowadays.  Do kids tear these out and hang them?  A couple of them match the mixed-media style of the show (which I feel like a pin-up should highlight); most are just random.

The largest offense here, though, is that none of this stuff really feels in line with The World of Gumball.  Gibson (and even artist Tyson Hesse, when he would write the material) really felt like he was in sync with the Looney Tunes vibe of Ben Bocquelet’s creation.  The Grab Bag’s creators are just writing kids’ shorts that happen to feature the characters.