Scooby Doo and the gang come back in an edgy new way with “Scooby Apocalypse” and ugh let’s just get this over with.
Written by Keith Giffen, J.M. DeMatteis, and Jim Lee
Illustrated by Howard PorterThose meddling kids—Fred, Daphne, Velma, Shaggy, and their dog, Scooby-Doo—get more ghost-debunking than they bargained for when faced with a fundamental change in their world. The apocalypse has happened. Old rules about logic no longer apply. The creatures of the night are among us, and the crew of the Magical Mystery Machine has to fight to survive—because in the apocalyptic badlands of the near-future, the horrors are real!
I don’t want to talk about “Scooby Apocalypse” #1 but I’m a content creator in 2016 and this is just what I have to do.
“Scooby Apocalypse” #1 is part of DC’s initiative of revitalizing old Hanna-Barbera properties for the comic page. You may have seen this in the form of “Future Quest” which came out a little while ago and was actually pretty rad. “Scooby Apocalypse” #1, on the other hand, is a joyless husk of a comic that took a decade off my life.
What sucks about “Scooby Apocalypse” #1 isn’t how gritty it is or how Shaggy’s new haircut makes me want to die. It’s how this rebooted Mystery Incorporated has nothing to do with the original Scooby Doo gang. I’m not a purist or anything who feels like everything needs to stick to tradition or whatever, but “Scooby Apocalypse” is a kind of okay sci-fi concept that had a Crayola drawing of Scooby Doo stapled to its face. “Scooby Apocalypse” follows four twentysomethings named Daphne, Fred, Shaggy, and Velma and their pup Scooby. Daphne is the failed host of a conspiracy show looking for her next big story at Burning Man (or Blazing Man, which is admittedly a way better name for the whole festival.) Shaggy is a dog trainer who works for a secret black ops program that tried to make weaponized dogs. One of the failed dogs, Scooby, didn’t have a killer instinct and was going to be put down before Shaggy saved him. That’s the reason Scooby can talk, because he’s a government experiment.
I watched a cartoon that explained that Scooby could talk because he was the descendant of an Aztec animal god and that’s still somehow not as dumb or unimaginative as this. That’s like the first thing I would write down if you asked me to passive aggressively write a modern Scooby reboot. It gets even weirder when it turns out that Velma is one of the heads of the program, whose ultimate goal was to release nanites into the atmosphere that would turn people into animals. Guess what? They are let loose and the whole world (save Mystery Inc.) turns into monsters.
Like I said earlier, this isn’t Scooby Doo, at least not in the sense that these are the characters or scenarios you’re familiar with. I’m all for creators branching out and trying new things (although I don’t know if you would call “government experiment” a new idea in 2016), but for a book whose tagline is “Scooby Doo but more violent and edgy” it’s kind of a misstep to remove anything familiar from the franchise save for “talking dog” and “Shaggy loves food.”
For example, you know how everyone loves “Afterlife With Archie”? It’s a similar comic in that it takes a wholesome American icon (Archie Comics) and mixes it with something edgy (zombies) to create an unnerving blend of the two. That comic works partly because the idea of Archie fighting off zombies in of itself, but it’s also unnerving to see a family friendly environment you’re familiar with get overrun with blood, guts, and Francesco Francavilla’s creepy as hell aesthetic. “Scooby Apocalypse” could be something like that, a title that puts the original franchise under a freaky kind of filter like “Afterlife” did, but it just goes off in its own direction that doesn’t feel connected to anything. It doesn’t feel scary, or funny, or anything. Just kind of there.
And what’s frustrating is that it’s so easy to make Scooby Doo creepy but this book just totally whiffs it. Goddamn everyone has been making jokes about how creepy it is for four teenagers and their dog to go around the country with no supervision and, essentially, get trapped in haunted houses with maniacs who dress up as monsters. A fucking Scooby Doo cartoon that aired on Cartoon Goddamn Network did a better version of being a creepy deconstruction of Scooby Doo than “Apocalypse” did. You think it’s cool that Shaggy has a bunch of tattoos and gauges in his ears? On Scooby Doo! Mystery Incorporated, it turns out that one of the main four characters was fucking sold as a child as part of a decades long conspiracy that involves blackmail, murder, and a demon living inside the moon. And that’s before Scooby enters The Black Lodge from Twin Peaks. When it comes to Scooby Doo, you either go hard in the paint or you get the fuck off my canvas.
Final Verdict: None. Scooby Doo! Mystery Incorporated is on Netflix so go watch that.
