2 out of 5

Tooo much. There’s too much story in Dungeon Critters; there’s too much art. It is stuffed to the point of bursting, nearly from page one, and unfortunately in a way that ends up effecting white noise, quite overwhelming how much smart and fun stuff is in that stuffing.

I’ll underline the praise that’s baked in there: co-creators Natalie Riess and Sara Goetter have very clear pictures of their characters, and an undeniable tone for which they’re aiming, and quite a few interesting story beats they want to hit – including a pretty great bit of misdirection towards the end. The titular critters are an anthropomorphic bunch of adventurers who hit on various tropes – big and silent; small and mouthy; etc. – and they get wrapped up in a pretty sprawling tale that mostly centers around… a dangerous plant. The ellipses wouldn’t have to be there – you can make a good story around anything – but they’re there because of the way this book is constructed: in which it’s never really clear that that plant is the focus until it is, which is related to why I indicated our creators were “aiming” for a tone, as opposed to necessarily achieving it: Riess and Goetter often jump right to the punchline of a joke, or right to the crux of a plotbeat or character arc without establishing anything leading up to it. Because all of this pulls from tropes, you can coast and get it, and this style arguably syncs with the shorter attention spans of 2020-era youths, but – perhaps putting my age on display – I don’t know that that short-attention-span style should translate into this format; or at least other things need to adapt to make it work, and that adaptation does not occur here.

An unfortunate example of this regards one of our lead’s pronouns. While the fact that this is pronoun related truly isn’t the focus, “Prince Chirp,” donned in somewhat more stereotypically “masculine” swashbuckling gear, is eventually referred to with ‘she’ pronouns. This could be a purposeful delay, playing with our assumptions of that title and how Chirp presents, but it instead just comes across as a gaffe of sorts, where Riess and Goetter either assumed (because they know Chirp so well) that the reader would intuit them as a ‘her,’ or were actually making a point about how it ultimately doesn’t matter to the story whatever pronouns Chirp uses, but in either case, it’s disruptive in a way that doesn’t serve the story at the point that we get this new information. It’s very possible that I missed an earlier reference (I did try to go back through, and though I think I was careful, I’m also pretty dumb and miss the obvious sometimes), but I’m kind of vibing off the fact that this pattern showed up again and again. I mentioned how it starts near the beginning, and indeed, we do a kind of rolling character intro towards the start, with our Critters battling the plant that would later become the MacGuffiny focus, but instead of pacing it like a title card “so and so likes puns,” the book jumps right to making jokes and plot points that would play off of that introductory beat. It’s utterly bizarre, but I would believe stems from folks sitting with and refining their story / characters for so long that they kind of forget that readers haven’t had that same opportunity. Compress this approach down as much as possible, because Riess and Goetter also want to work in about 5 different story frameworks into their 200 pages, and you can start to understand how / we ended up here, and also likely why our editors (Calista Brill, Mariah Huehner) had trouble clamping it down. Like, it’s all theoretically good in its individual pieces – why wouldn’t it be good altogether?

What sneaks through is our creators’ eagerness, and clear love for what they’re making. As such, the book is undeniably an easy read, and inevitably, with so much stuff thrown at the page, some of it sticks. When it does, it’s quite a joy. However, I was also constantly disengaged; not connecting with the material or characters, buried as they were under so much noise. So I found myself enjoying flipping through the book when I’d pick it up, but having very little need to pick it up. I’d even started writing this review before realizing I had some pages left – I’d set it down, and my brain filed the story as complete.

As my own reveal, I’m writing this several years after release, having reader a later book from this duo that absolutely fixes all of these issues. I’m very glad I read that one first, because that’s locked me in to read more, and lets me see what’s been learned on the writer / artist journey from here to there. But, frankly, had I read Dungeon Critters first, I would’ve figured this as another Boom!-type knockoff of talented folks lacking the focus for their talents. My thanks to Natalie an Sara for proving me wrong, and to those who supported them – clearly smarter readers than me.