Creative Staff:
Story: Art Baltazar & Franco
Art: Art Baltazar
What They Say:
Herman finally gets the mask back, but what happens when he unleashes his deepest inner awesomeness? A whole lot of crazy, that’s what! But do the kids like him better as the Mask, or as regular Daddy Herman?
Content: (please note that content portions of a review may contain spoilers):
The Itty Bitty mask miniseries has certainly had its story thread throughout the whole run with what it wanted to do, but it was also rather nice that the first two issues largely stood alone when it came to the stories they told, wrapping things up by the end while making you want to see more. With the previous issue, we got the first half of a two part storyline that went bigger and bolder – and sillier. Shifting Shazbert as the Mask into a superhero mold certainly wasn’t a surprise as it definitely makes for some fun moments, but particularly because of the design as it goes for the old school bright and colorful approach that so many modern day costumes avoid because of the silliness of it all and the garish nature. Which I get. But this was just fun to see.
With Shazbert as the Mask defending the city against the aliens, we get that continuing here as they really go all out in order to get revenge for half of the moon being eaten away out from under them. Their revenge is an eye for an eye kind of thing, so the aliens just start eating the city first before moving on to the whole planet.The scenes are simple as we see them eating all kinds of things, and I could just hear a certain Blondie song playing in the back of mind as they did it. When the Mask shows up to really deal with this, it allows for plenty of goofy action to happen with the old school spaceships tied to campy 50’s style superhero antics, such as funneling them all together and wrapping them up like a bouquet of giant flowers. But being the kind of series it is, Shazbert has to try and fix things since he’s a good guy overall, and that means repairing the moon.
And what better way to do it than to replace the chewed out part with cheese? And how better to get that much cheese than to furiously milk a dozen or so cows in an intense way that has them all in love with him after, to great comical effect. It’s all good natured fun as we watch the repair job get underway and the reactions from the aliens when they realize that their moon is now made up of swiss cheese, which isn’t exactly the nicest of smelling homes now. And we also get an almost epilogue-like section that has the magic spell shop owner putting together the tools of his trade to regain the mask so that it doesn’t cause any further trouble. There’s a lot of real silliness with this as it goes through so many forms across a ton of panels as this isn’t a book filled with splash pages. We get a lot of variety and humor blended into all of this as we get our resolution, bringing things back to being all right in the world by the end.
In Summary:
While not the high end of humor, what we get here is very solid all ages humor applied in a bright, bold and very fun way to make for a solid series overall. Franco and Baltazar work their style and method well and I loved seeing it applied to this particular character as it really does allow for wild interpretation. The series hit the right mark with its characters, the wackiness of the wild takes and what the Mask could do and for going in just very silly directions that reminded me of comics from the days of yore. I’m hopeful that the team will get a chance to work on more Dark Horse properties in the future, though one-off specials may be best, since there’s a lot of things they could have fun with, especially if they could get their chance at an all ages Aliens or Predator series. Dare to dream, dare to dream.
Grade: B
Age Rating: 13+
Released By: Dark Horse Comics
Release Date: February 11th, 2015
MSRP: $2.99
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