DC’s revivals of their Hanna-Barbera properties continue here, with Garth Ennis and Mauricet’s take on Wacky Races characters Dick Dastardly and Muttley. Read on to see whether this book succeeds, fails, or does a little of both. Know that there will be some spoilers.
Written by Garth EnnisCover by Mauricet
Illustrated by Mauricet
Colored by John Kalisz
Lettered by Rob SteenFrom man to man’s best friend! Mutt has undergone a shocking transformation and unstabilium is to blame! Can he and Dick find a cure back home in the United States? Or will Air Force General Harrier personally make sure the guys are grounded for good? Meanwhile, the president holds a very important press conference…trust us, you won’t want to miss it!
Of all Hanna-Barbera concepts for Garth Ennis to reimagine, Dick Dastardly and Muttley seem like the two most suited to him. After leaving Wacky Races, where they were the antagonists, they got their own show titled Dastardly and Muttley in Their Flying Machines. So basically, they’re villainous aviators who get into comedic situations. Other than the relative lack of Ennis’s trademark violence, the concept fits right into his oeuvre. So why does this book alternates between madcap hilarity and supremely boring scenes?
The first few pages, in which Dastardly and Muttley break out of a prison, pack a few surprises into every page. The sense of tension is high — it’s a breakout! — as is the sense of fun. You become as disoriented as the characters, in a positive way: what’s going on? Who are these people? Why are they trying to kill our main characters? Why are they speaking like that? And where did all of these cartoon devices come from?! That sense of disorientation actually has the opposite effect, orienting you to the story and taking you along for the ride.
Mauricet does some nice work here differentiating between the reality of the characters and the cartoon devices they start using. The giant, perfectly circular holes in characters particularly create that dissonance between what should be reality and what is clearly not. But Mauricet’s art style in the realistic scenes does lean toward the more expressive side, and his real objects occasionally lack extreme detail. So, it’s up to Kalisz to fully sell the idea that certain objects are cartoons. He mostly succeeds. Kalisz uses garish colors to contrast against the colors of the book’s reality, and he further differentiates by keeping the linework of reality black while the linework of the cartoons is colored. It’s not a perfect technique, but it’s effective enough to sell the fast-paced and memorable scene.
Unfortunately, the next scene brings the story to a halt. In it, Dastardly and Muttley have a conversation in a diner. Look, I understand that not every scene can or should be as wild a ride as the opening one. Scenes like this one are necessary for moving the plot forward and developing the characters. The problem here is that the scene barely accomplishes either of those things. Ennis has some good dialogue and the characters are certainly fun to watch, and Mauricet’s art gets the actions across efficiently and without fanfare. The characters are just aimless in a bad way. They repeat the situation they’re in, which we already know, Muttley points out how Dastardly’s dialogue has gotten wackier, which, okay, is a hell of a lot of fun, and then there’s an end-of-scene moment that didn’t work for me at all. Some tightening up could have helped this scene. Maybe it could have been two pages instead of four? As it is, it’s so long and meandering that it broke all the excitement I had from the book’s opening scene.
But then, suddenly, we get the most exciting and suspenseful scene of the book! Wordlessly, Warpig One, the plane dispensing cartoon chemtrails, flies over an ocean, converts a shark into a cartoon character, and heads towards Washington, DC. Ennis writes just enough to let Mauricet and Kalisz go to work, and they do. They have a much easier time conveying the transformation of an animal than when they earlier tried to show that a single object is already a cartoon. We see the detailed and realistically illustrated shark before the transformation, and we see exactly how those details disappear. Its face turns anthropomorphic, and its coloring turns from gray to purple. Suddenly, it’s gained sentience, and an attitude with it. And in the next panel… Warpig One flies over the White House! Suspense! Excitement! Madcap tomfoolery!
Continued belowYet immediately after, we switch to another scene that stops “Dastardly and Muttley”’s momentum. Its clever moment and exciting ending don’t make up for the boring rest of the scene. And then there’s one more scene that follows that same pattern before the issue ends on a dud of a joke.
That’s “Dastardly and Muttley” in a nutshell: incredible fun gives way to incredibly boring, even if there are plenty of clever moments strewn about. This book should be the perfect fit for Ennis, and Mauricet and Kalisz do well by his ideas. The problem is that Ennis doesn’t exactly know how this almost-fun story should develop, so the characters end up aimless. I’m hopeful future issues can fix these problems, though. As long as Ennis focuses less on developing expositional scenes and more on the wacky world he’s creating.
Final Verdict: 6.8 – An unevenly madcap journey between high excitement and meandering exposition.
