ADVENTURE TIME: MATHEMATICAL EDITION Vol. 1

ADVENTURE TIME: MATHEMATICAL EDITION Vol. 1

Writer: Ryan North

Artists: Shelli Paroline, Braden Lamb, Mike Holmes

$34.99, Kaboom! (an imprint of Boom! Studios), 144 pgs.

ISBN  978-1608863242

Licensed comics based on popular film and television properties are often ungainly, disappointing affairs, creative train wrecks that fail both as comics and as emulations of the source material. Well, ADVENTURE TIME fans, make merry and rejoice, because the ADVENTURE TIME comic book does not have that problem.

The plot of this collection is straightforward enough: Finn the Human and his shape-shifting canine companion Jake are sucked into a bag of holding (tabletop gaming nerds will get that) by an evil Lich (tabletop gaming nerds will get that, too) who threatens to destroy the Land of Ooo. Hilarity and, of course, adventure ensue. The comic’s tone is pitch-perfect: the dialogue perfectly evokes the show’s voice, and the art takes full advantage of the show’s vibrant color palette; writer Ryan North and the talented artists with whom he works totally nail it.

The book is more than a mere recreation of the TV series, though. The creators realize that comic books are a physical medium, so they incorporate gags taking advantage of the print format. Footnotes offer humorous parenthetical asides; secondary “parallel narrative” comic strips run across the bottoms of certain pages; “fourth wall”-shattering gags reference the reader’s turning of pages and how it affects events in-story. There’s a wealth of creative use of the print medium to be found here.

In short, the book is innovative as a standalone work, yet evocative of the source. Top marks all around.

TIPS FOR LIBRARIANS: Yowch…sticker shock! If this book has one flaw, it’s the hefty price-point: thirty-five bucks for fewer than 150 pages! That’s expensive even for a hardcover edition. It will circulate—this is virtually guaranteed, given the show’s popularity among both kids and kids-at-heart—but if your graphic novel collection development budget is on the small side, you’ve got a difficult choice ahead of you. You could easily purchase two paperback graphic novels of similar size to this one for about the same money. This same story is collected in a much cheaper paperback edition ($14.99, ISBN 978-1608862801), but that collection lacks this edition’s bonus content and (obviously) its quality binding.

READERS’ ADVISORY NOTES: It’s kid-friendly, but so genuinely funny that adults will love it as well. Fans of the show are an obvious target audience (Time to hook some new readers!), but ADVENTURE TIME’s many pop culture allusions might also appeal to tabletop gamers and video gamers of multiple generations.  

CONTENT ADVISORY: Cartoon action/mild violence, mild crude language (i.e., “butt” “sucky”)

Review©2014, C. Michael Hall.