2 out of 5

Vast improvements in art and lettering unfortunately are still let down by the writing, which repeats several of the mistakes found in the first season.

I’m happy that co-creator and season one artist Justin Bleep hasn’t been ousted, still offering up covers for these issues and showing how his super stylized look can be effective for highlight shots, but he was not a great fit for the serialized nature of the contents, with beats missed and character models varying too much.  New artist Armando Zanker is a wonderful replacement: His expressive pencils and super poppy colors have a zany Craig McKracken sense to them, bolstered by a bevy of settings and characters to play with.  More importantly, Zanker gets comedy pacing, and adds much to the humor through visuals, even if/when the script falls flat.

To which: We again start with a really positive first issue that wrings some good gags out of the office humor / superheroics mash-up, and even when issue two ups the calamity aspect and heads out of the SCI building for a battle, there’s enough blending of the gag types to make the setup work.  However, the same season one mistake is made by attempting to get too plotty: Am arranged marriage for Plasmarella takes the staff off-planet, and the series thereafter becomes either repeats of already used gags or just a super-hero parody book, with someone mentioning receipts every fifth page as a reminder of the initial premise.  The repeated gags aren’t particularly inventive the first time through, and then the story’s trajectory sort of just feels like an apologist’s response to some of the sexism in the first season, but even if that’s not the case, it just doesn’t fulfill any promise of the first couple issue’s yuks and thus ends up being… boring, unfortunately.

On the plus side, retrospect or better editors from Action Lab (the first volume was published through APE) smartly encouraged the dropping of The Wombat pedophile angle, and the personality-filled lettering of Brant Fowler finally helped to make a returning gag from season one – a character purposefully echoing their own words for ominousness – make sense.

Should there be a season three, I’d recommend not trying to over-story things.  Just keep it low key and in the office; there’s plenty of material there.