3 out of 5

In republishing / collecting the Perhapanauts books, Black Caravan has printed up a single lead-in issue for each volume, which then (I think) is included in the subsequent trade paperback. It’s a slightly confusing model that I’m sure has some financial justifications, though I’m not sure if there ends up being any reason to buy the single versus waiting for the trade.

But anyhow: these books tend to have a small slice of the upcoming story, then several shorts. All of this stuff is done by the regular team of Todd Dezago and Craig Rousseau (with Rico Renzi coloring some, and Craig, presumably, coloring the rest), and all of this stuff is exactly in line with what’s come before: very, very broad characterizations for our paranormal problem-solving team, and pretty harmless cases investigated. Rousseau’s art has gotten better along the way in terms of breaking pages up, and keeping conversation flowing – Dezago has similarly learned to not dump as much text on pages, improving the pacing – but we’re still essentially at ground zero in terms of any real story development. As I think I’ve quipped before, Perhapanuts kind of has an Archie Comics vibe: drop-in, drop-out.

There are some ongoing threads, which are picked up on – Triangle follows up on investigating the Bermuda Triangle, which was namedropped last arc, methinks – but the preview pages here are really just a summary of events up to this point, with ghost Molly yammering at us, 4th wall style. Prior to that, Voices in the Night is a purely Archie thing – a gag-strip about call-ins to a spooky radio show – and A Big Bang continues a joke about the crew really liking Big Bang Theory and Young Sheldon, I guess. Leading the comic in is the longest strip, The Van Meter Visitor, which 100% repeats the same structure as volume 2, involving some time travel shenanigans. Cool.

I don’t mind a book like this, just as I don’t mind Archie. And the creative duo has clearly settled into a nice routine, with Renzi’s colors versus Rousseau’s adding just a wrinkle of variance to the look (Craig’s colors add to the inking a bit; Renzi goes very clean-lined), but it’s also so very inconsequential that I can’t say I have any need to follow up with the next trade.