2 out of 5 

This is, once again, an amazing looking book. Thick paper stock, gold-edged, that’s great for adding depth to Doug TenNapel’s sketchy linework and the coloring tandem of flatter Radka Kavalcova and colorist Katherine Garner; awesome full bleed end sheets from Alejandro Mirabal; synced in clean but poppy design by Joe Potter; and clasped between hardcovers with a rockin’ front by Doug, and a rear cover by none other than Mike Mignola. 

The contents are also full of Doug’s skills with animation, and layout, and the story has the high-speed energy indicative of the labors of love these independently produced books have uniformly been. 

Unfortunately those contents are also some of the more blatant examples of Doug’s self-confessed lackings as a writer, and that runs up alongside incredibly broad humor, and inconsistent storytelling, and disruptive nostalgia, for a reading experience that was art-aside, boring, teetering on – depending on your nostalgia tolerance – annoying. 

Now, once more: I know an incredible amount effort goes into these books, but that, plus the admirable presentation, just isn’t enough to put us over a line this time, at least for me. While the story starts off very fun, continuing directly from book one with Jim “dead” and the Princess, Snot, and Farmer Jim finding an equilibrium, only to be interrupted by Bob the Goldfish’s cat minions, it’s actually with the reviving of EWJ himself (spoilers? he’s on the cover and the book is named after him?) that things start to feel a bit… off. 

With any given TenNapel book, I’d normally say his creativity and slapstick help to counter his very generic core story themes – easy, Christian-valued wins like love is good, and be honest, and etcetera. EWJ book one was a fun mash-up of the classic games and a more fleshed out story – like Doug taking control of his character. Book two rather feels like every joke and plotline is driven towards being able to reference something from the games, getting to a point where he slows down to namecheck Shiny and Interplay, and it’s of the fashion where something is delivered as a joke solely because it’s a reference, and not because it’s inherently funny. This approach kills the feeling of spontaneity to Doug’s writing. Though it’s of course hard for me to assess how this would read if I wasn’t such a fan of the games, I think there’s an inherent guiding cartoon logic that’s missing, since we’re led instead by the need to hit these nostalgia milestones, and it really just makes things feel random instead of exciting. 

This follows in how Bob and his cats are fitted into the story: just as a Marvel or DC writer might have to bend over backwards to retroactively justify their tale, here Doug is trying to jam some square story pegs into pre-made circular holes, and it’s just… clunky. 

Then we get to the characterization of Jim – a character built completely around being hapless, meaning character growth… is not inherent. There’s a struggle with building an ongoing narrative around that. With a plot consisting of the princess’s kidnap and rescue from Bob’s planet by Jim and the crew, TenNapel tries to split the difference: make Jim dumber than last time (it’s beyond amusing naivety to just punchline setups and fodder), but then also try to map some “conquer your own fear” storyline onto him. Recall Doug being an uneven scripter, and we’re essentially just toggling these modes on and off, with Jim overcoming and succumbing to fear as necessary for the scene, and not really story justified. 

Lastly, perhaps due to my clear lack of immersion in this outing, I found this to be one of the rare Doug reads where some pages’ reading order (word balloons or eye direction) was off. If I’m adding all this up, it’s another consequence of being guided by a need to hit reference marks, and not a more organic flow. 

Would I read another EWJ book? For sure. But I do think this is a series that can only really take off once it’s moved past any need to nod to the games, and can moreso tap into TenNapel’s creativity anew and unleashed.