Strawberry Shortcake #1 Interior Reviews 

“Strawberry Shortcake” #1

By | April 28th, 2016
Posted in Reviews | 2 Comments

“Strawberry Shortcake” is a comic book where our hero faces off against a villain whose name kind of sounds like the bad guy’s from Jessica Jones. Of course we were going to talk about it. Spoilers ahead!

Written by Georgia Ball
Illustrated by Amy Mebberson

Strawberry Shortcake returns to comics! And along with her comes the return of one of her most nefarious foes, the Purple Pie Man! Join us for the launch of this berry special two-part story re-introducing everyone’s favorite bad baker to the current Strawberry Shortcake mythos!

Some disclaimers.

I don’t know anything about Strawberry Shortcake. This isn’t like, “Haha, I am a straight male outside of this comic’s demographic, how silly!!” No, I have a basic understanding of Care Bears, I know more about My Little Pony than World History because of a dark period we all went through in 2011, and I’m like barely straight. I have no context for “Strawberry Shortcake” #1 except for what I can gather from context clues. There’s a bunch of children who have kind of anime hair and they live in a nightmare world based around desserts. However, after reading the comic, I feel like that’s all I need.

“Strawberry Shortcake” #1 starts with with these unsupervised children finding an old man made out of berries (a Berrykin), who’s putting the lives of children in danger by refusing to repair the train he takes them on for rides. In order to make sure that all the Berrykins don’t end up as jelly splattered across twisted smoking metal, Strawberry Shortcake enters a baking contest where the prize is a train. A fully functioning train. I guess the competition ran out of Starbucks gift cards and just put up the first thing they saw. Anyway, this starts Strawberry Shortcake’s magical adventure and it all goes pretty standard. At least until we get to the reason I decided to review this comic.

Strawberry Shortcake enters the regional qualification for the train baking contest and meets the Purple Pie Man, who is somehow not David Tennant from Jessica Jones. There’s signs that he won’t be as much of a major creep as his namesake, but just a dork who sabotages baking contests. If a review is meant to be about how excited a product made me, then “Strawberry Shortcake” #1 failed completely.

But then, just as I was ready to call it a night and lounge back in my fancy comic reviewer chair, job well done, I decided to actually read “Strawberry Shortcake” #1 instead of just fishing through it for about 800 words worth of content. What I found was an innocent story about friendship and people coming together to stop old people from killing babies with faulty trains by winning baking contests. It was simple, and as I mentioned earlier, something I had no context for.

As I looked up from my reviewers chair, a child and her father came into the store. The dad took his Magic: The Gathering binder out of his attache case and told his daughter he would be back in an hour, before bolting downstairs into the shop’s tournament hall (a basement that Slick Sammy put some poker tables in a few months ago). With her father gone, the girl looked through the comics on the shelves, noticeably put off by covers like that “Batgirl” Killing Joke variant that upset the internet a while back (the one where the Joker pointed a finger gun at a weeping Batgirl). Slick Sammy had printed a bunch of those out and stapled them to each comic he sold in solidarity with whoever drew that cover, so she was pretty freaked out in general.

After a few minutes, the girl approached my reviewer chair (a crusty beach chair that no one had bothered to remove in years) and noticed I was reading something that didn’t look like it would be found in a serial killer’s apartment. She asked if I could look at “Strawberry Shortcake” #1 (or “that comic” according to her) and I relented, getting up to go flip through Alan Moore’s “Neonomicon”, the only graphic novel our store sells. While poring over the pages of manfish rape, I heard chuckling as the girl genuinely enjoyed “Strawberry Shortcake” #1 and its cast of colorful characters.

This struck a nerve with me, a nerve that hasn’t left. She hasn’t either, by the way, her dad is still playing Magic. Anyway, I realized that maybe I don’t have to compare the mischievous villain to a rapist from a Netflix show after all. Like I said earlier, I don’t have a context for “Strawberry Shortcake” but maybe that’s because it isn’t my context. It belongs to this girl, to some other kid, to someone who hasn’t been utterly soiled by decades of comics and can enjoy cutesy cartoon characters at face value.

Final Verdict: 10.2 – I don’t know if that girl will come back to my store since I threw rocks at her when she tried to leave without paying. But still, this comic opened my eyes to a world of fun and innocence in comics that I sometimes forget exists, a world untouched by creepy people from the internet. “Strawberry Shortcake” #1 taught me the value of taking things at face value and not making everything a joke about fictional rapists.


James Johnston

James Johnston is a grizzled post-millenial. Follow him on Twitter to challenge him to a fight.

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