Invader Zim 17 Featured Reviews 

“Invader Zim” #17

By | February 17th, 2017
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Is this issue of Invader Zim a worthy continuation of the cult hit show, or is it a pale imitation? Read on for our review, which contains mild spoilers.

Written by Danielle Koenig
Illustrated by Warren Wucinich

A perfect starting point for the Invader ZIM comics! ZIM’s latest doomsday device might actually work, and Dib is, as usual, powerless to stop it! But an unexpected ally might be just what the doctor ordered! As long as that doctor’s credentials aren’t from an unaccredited university.

Due to the rotating creative teams, issues of the Invader Zim comic have switched between: pitch-perfect spiritual successors to the show; flat attempts to recapture that spirit; and individual creative voices telling a story all their own, using the Zim characters. This issue, written by Danielle Koenig, isn’t a complete flop, but neither is it completely successful in emulating the show or displaying its own voice. Luckily, regular series artist Warren Wucinich joins Koenig to prop up her script.

Bias alert: I’m a fan of the original show. The source material’s dialogue has a madcap insanity all its own, not easily duplicated. It’s clear that Koenig is trying her best to plug into that, but she ever so slightly misses the mark. She has a tendency to add self-aware remarks when a non-sequitur would have been funnier; she continues certain thoughts one speech bubble too far in some places while stopping them one speech bubble short in others. Absurdist comedy like this is all in the nuance, so by being slightly off the mark, we end up with a completely different form of comedy, and a completely different book. This is one of those cases where, even though it would have been much further from the spirit of the original characters and dialogue, I wish she would have stuck with her own voice and style instead of trying to recapture that of this series. By failing to fully do either, we end up with something that fans can’t help but negatively compare to its predecessor.

The story itself is structured in such a way that suggests Koenig had trouble writing it. Instead of one overarching story through the twenty pages, we get one- to four-page vignettes with a framing sequence to tie them all together. I got the feeling while reading that maybe she had trouble coming up with a full story for these characters and settled for this instead. It’s equally possible that she had a few tiny ideas and wanted a way to use all of them, but in either case, while the resulting stories do entertain, the end result is less satisfying than if we were to get a full-length story.

Despite all this, though, Wucinich’s art greatly redeems the issue’s writing missteps and enhances what was good about it. He’s great at magnifying jokes: one scene shows three consecutive panels which depict the city, the world, and finally the universe’s reaction to a stench. In the first, he gives the city a great sense of scale by devoting a large portion of the panel to buildings and sky, all of which are covered by fog-like lines that represent the stench. With the few human bodies here lying on the ground, we get a complete, large-scale dystopian vision of a small area. In the second panel, we see the entire world with a giant green smoke cloud, both of which are laughably stylized. The final panel is mostly a black background, with a tiny green blip in the center. By furthering the stylization as the joke progresses, the artist magnifies the comedy. He uses other techniques like this throughout the issue, and each one is uniquely suited to the joke at hand.

Wucinich has a great feel for this world and understands its core aspects well enough that he can seamlessly work them into his own style. From characters to environments to panel structures to even word balloons, everything is based on a contrast between angular and round designs. Zim and Dib’s outlines, for instance, consist of sets of slightly curved lines which meet to form sharp edges. Likewise, their eyes are represented as circles, but their pupils appear as rectangles. Even in the scene where Dib’s head expands to multiple times its size, its roundness is offset by the sharp angles of his ears and hair. Wucinich’s inking style displays this as well: in the aforementioned scene, the thick inks outlining Dib’s round head reach out just enough in certain places to form points, as if the outline actually consisted of multiple straight lines instead of one continuous round one. This round vs angular design aspect was a hallmark of the show, and it’s great to see Wucinich adopting it here and making it his own.

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There is also a three-page back-up in the issue, written by Sam Logan and illustrated by Jarrett Williams. Williams clearly understands the series’ fundamental design principles, even if the work looks less polished than Wucinich’s. The story and art use the simple but effective technique of panel repetition combined with changing small details to increase tension until everything explodes in the end. I enjoyed this story — it used its length well.

Overall, Wucinich certainly makes this look like a worthy successor to the show, but Koenig’s writing falls flat a bit too often for me to have a completely positive view of the issue. I appreciate that this series is trying new things and giving the spotlight to independent creators, but the overall issue-to-issue consistency has been all over the place as a result. There seems to be a regular creative team of writer Eric Truehart with artists Aaron Alexovich and Warren Wucinich, but that team only lasts a few issues at a time before handing the reins to a fill-in team. If this is to keep the book monthly, I’d probably rather a less frequent schedule so we could have a more consistent comic. As it stands, though, this is yet another issue that doesn’t quite live up to those heights.

Final Verdict: 6.3 – If you are interested in either creator or are a Zim superfan, I’d say try the issue out; for those who pick and choose which issues they read from this title, I’d say skip this one and wait for the regular team to come back.


Nicholas Palmieri

Nick is a South Floridian writer of films, comics, and analyses of films and comics. Flight attendants tend to be misled by his youthful visage. You can try to decipher his out-of-context thoughts over on Twitter at @NPalmieriWrites.

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