4 out of 5

I get a lot of smiles out of the media I consume, but eliciting a legitimate out-loud laugh is most certainly an accomplishment.  It’s an accomplishment Chris Schweizer manages to achieve twice in this excellent Creeps followup: The Trolls Will Feast!

That Trolls both appear in the subtitle and on the cover should make their eventual appearance in this volume a foregone conclusion, but the fun of the narrative isn’t hinging on their reveal.  In fact, it’s somewhat the opposite: While some good creative bits come from the Creeps learning how to see the trolls (which are naturally invisible), Schweizer has a good time taking the piss out of the creatures, not by taking the typical cartoon route of making them dunderheads, but by updating the whole smelly, pay-the-toll troll thing to the modern era, with incredibly humorous results, swirled about with plenty of mythology of his own design.  The story, overall, follows traditional kids’ adventure beats (including a sort of rushed ‘believe in yourself’ ending), and a couple of key elements are telegraphed pretty clearly for older readers, but perhaps they’ll catch kids out.  Still, that’s not exactly Chris’ charm, but rather his ability to completely energize those predictable beats, and then to stuff the edges with wonderful extras like a legless veteran troll hunter, ejector pants, and Greenland paranoia.

The art and colors are the some of the most effervescent I’ve ever seen (besides other Schweizer work), like inspiration was bottled and then used for the inks.  Chris had this incredibly loose way of drawing and coloring that’s both sloppy and spot-on.  Shadows are splotches, characters a squiggle of lines, and yet there’s never a doubt what’s going on.  There’s a car crash scene that my eyes flew over and understood, and then I went back and studied the pages I was actually slightly confused by the character placement and setting.  Which sounds bad, but it’s actually a backhanded compliment: There’s something absolutely intuitive about the art that keeps you dialed in to the scenes.

The colors share a similar spirit.  Smartly opting for a palette of sickly greens and browns to match the tale’s odoriferous qualities – trolls being especially sneaky – Schweizer pulls a smart move by casting his baddies in red, the same shade as a flashback sequence.  Certainly this makes them stick out, just by being in contrast to the other colors, but it’s also a way to remind us of the other-worldly nature of the race, initially appearing in the flashbacks before suddenly crossing over to the ‘real’ world.  It’s just another in the bag of organic storytelling tricks Schweitzer employs.

Eyes also tend to fly over the page due to Trolls being a brisk read, though.  As soon as the team stumbles across the baddies a few pages in, it becomes, essentially, one long chase sequence.  And this momentum comes crashing into the conclusion, during which Chris unfortunately writes himself into a corner which requires something BIG to escape, and both the fast pace of the story and Chris’ dashed art style don’t really allow for that exact sense of scale, so the end sequence is, alas, underwhelming.  Similarly owing to the momentum is an unfortunate lack of actual applying the Creeps beyond Mitchell (monster expert) and Jarvis (gadgets).  The personalities are all intact, but the characters just don’t have much directly to do except run from set piece to set piece.

But I’m basically saying that Trolls! is so enjoyable that you can’t help but consume it as quick as possible…  And criticisms come after the fact, too distracted are you by the fantastic art, funny dialogue, creative bits and pieces, and… well, yeah, just the whole darn thing.