Over the last three years, Ryan North, Shelli Paroline, and Braden Lamb have sent us on all manner of madcap adventures throughout the land of Ooo. During that time, they continuously shattered the space-time continuum, explored the furthest reaches of the map, had our heroes encounter all sorts of new villains, and had a generally rad time expanding on and playing in this world. And now, as their legacy comes to an end, this “Adventure Time” team bows out with the same style and humor that helped make this not only one of the best licensed comics of all time, but one of the best titles on the stands, period.
Written by Ryan North
Art by Braden Lamb, Shelli Paroline
It’s the end of an era…the last ADVENTURE TIME issue featuring the Eisner Award-winning team of Ryan North, Shelli Paroline, and Braden Lamb. It’s your chance to say goodbye, and experience an adventure you’ll never forget.
In a way, ‘Adventure Time and the Case of the Missing Thing’ is a summation of everything North, Paroline, and Lamb have worked toward with their run on this comic. It’s like a condensed version of their themes, their visual gags, and general humor all crammed into 24 side-splitting, heart-warming pages. A total Everything Comic.
The book starts off with Marceline accompanying Finn and Jake on an adventure in the hopes of writing a boss new song about them, only to find their adventure today involves looking at ladybugs, because not all adventures involve punching other dudes, okay? Anyway, just as they’re about to go home, LSP suddenly appears in an even more frantic state of duress than usual: turns out, someone stole her star, and now everyone is a suspect.
What follows is a Glob-smacked send up of Rashomon, as LSP drags BMO, Princess Bubblegum, Finn and Jake, Party God, Ice King, and Marceline in to collect alibis and figure out who stole her missing thing. The day before, Peebles had held an emergency princess meeting and pretty much everyone was there, including Finn and Jake, who crashed the place in order to help guard the snacks (and princesses) from evil skeletons. All their stories revolve around a few hours, and the especially impatient LSP gets continuously frustrated when none of the narratives corroborates with each other. For the first time that I can remember, all 24 pages of this book are given to North, Paroline, and Lamb, and they don’t waste a single bit of that space. This issue is crammed full of gags and jokes and winks, it can almost be overwhelming on the first read through.
Like many of the other arcs in the series, North, Paroline, and Lamb play with the feebleness of memory and time but the stability of friendship. When they first started out on this series, three years ago, they had said they wanted the book to maintain the spirit of the show while also exploring concepts and situations that would only be able to work in comics. There’s been tons of word play; smack-town comedic timing; the images and text conflating in on each other; and page warping stories. All that is evident right here in this issue.
By this point, North has the characters’ voices and behaviors down as perfectly as any of the writers on the show. He’s figured out exactly how each character would approach their interrogation and manages to grab numerous jokes out of it. Take a look at Bubblegum’s alibi, where she talks more than anyone else, about herself, and how when other people do speak, it’s to praise her genius, and compare it with Marceline, who didn’t even register the other people there, but rather the chaos Finn and Jake were creating with the snack-stealing skeletons. Because of course BMO would approach its tale like a detective noir. And Party God would conjure up drinks because it never stops. Like the show itself, North’s developed such a firm grasp on the material he’s able to mix up the situations and characters any way he wants, but it never feels stale or out of place.
Of course, none of the book would have worked if Paroline and Lamb were not only apt at keeping up with North’s own manic approach to the material, but also able to expand on it themselves, and take it into even more bonkers directions. They’ve managed to inhabit and customize the Land of Ooo just as well, and the book reads like it’s their own creation, rather than them following the Adventure Time style guide. (Which is amazing, by the way.) Just as the flashbacks are staged perfectly for whomever is telling the story, the mood of the flashback — the tone, the colors, the rhythm of the panelling — help sell the narrative and the narrator. BMO has her detective noir personality going, while Ice King’s frames are filled with words as he desperately tries to connect with anyone who’ll listen.
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Their confidence in the material and their own ability has grown significantly as well. They don’t have to rely on the typical establishing shot/medium shot structure for presenting a new scene. Paroline and Lamb have figured out the exact amount of information to give us so we never get lost, always know the relationship the characters have to each other — both emotionally and physically, and a clear sense of the action. For a book that’s been as wild and fun and hysterical as this one, that ability speaks wonders to the creators and their craft.
Ryan North, Shelli Paroline, and Braden Lamb accomplished something special with this whole “Adventure Time” series, and #35 perfectly sums up what they had been trying to do. It can serve as a nice little primer to the whole of their adventure or one last joyful romp through Ooo along with some old friends.
Final Verdict: 9.3. Fun, hysterical, and delivered with a complete and total understanding of the characters and this world, “Adventure Time” #35 is a satisfying topper to one spectacular run.
