4 out of 5

I couldn’t have dreamed up Adventure Time as a comic, and I wouldn’t have matched Dinosaur Comics’ Ryan North to be the scribe, but damn if it don’t work and damn if it ain’t pretty spot on.

AT is one of the most gloriously hilariously random shows I’ve had the sweet blessings to see.  It’s absolutely informed by all of the irreverence that came before – Simpsons, Ren and Stimpy, and so on – but it combines this with a modern awareness that, frankly, those shows never had.  Now I love Ren and Stimpy, but it exists on an absolute fringe of cartoonness, whereas Adventure Time takes from the modern pool of humor that springs from a culture where 8 years olds are capable of creating memes that 30 years olds find amusing, but probably and maybe for different reasons are both parties laughing at the same thing.  It’s not quite ‘layered’ humor, it’s just the openness that our brains have developed to exposure of concepts up and down the ladder, sort of throwing things and seeing what sticks.  This varies from the sort of straight-out nonsense of old style cartoons – the Looney Tunes screwball nature that R & S more pulled from.

So the fact that Adventure Time is in an animated, bite-sized medium, with no real plot carryovers episode to episode (mostly), seems ingrained into the style of its humor.  It needs the fluidity of animation.

And yet it works incredibly in comic form.  North’s practice with meta-textual writing with his webcomic is required, stepping into and outside of the Adventure Time world (with ‘to the reader’ commentary at the bottom of most pages, similar to the hover text on his site) and whether by accident or on purpose, realizing that what would make the bridge work is to actually give the story a bit more structure – storylines go for several issues, and the connections to the outside world (a great time travel storyline that references the original Adventure Time short) help to ground the writing so it’s not just random jokes and images flying across the page.  As is the case with a lot of animation-to-comic art, the representations are pretty spot-on with the show, saving the more interpretive stuff for the short back-ups which appear each issue, which are perfect fluff for those needing a taste of random Finn and Jake, and gives exposure to some indie cats as well.  While the drawings in the meat of the book might be carbon copies of television, credit is absolutely due to paneling and layout, which maintains the scope of the Land of Oo and its many inhabitants without, again, just seeming like random imagery tossed in when needed.

This being said, as noted in North’s Back to the Future tumblr, his humor does become predictable in its style and pace of the punchlines, even though it is consistently funny.  I’m glad to see his writing chops being developed for longer form scripting, and it’s being put to good use with sprawling plots that tap into his sciencey brain, but you can rely on a certain structure of words and sequence of events to get you to that chuckle you’re hoping for.

I honestly didn’t appreciate the show at first, and the comic helped to ramp my brain up.  They now both work in concert to create a full picture of how creatively “loose” we can get and still have it make sense, be, on the whole, family friendly, and be tons of fun to experience.