By Dustin Cabeal

It seems one crossover wasn’t enough for BOOM!/kaboom! this week and they opted for a second. The first being a Grumpy Cat/Garfield crossover (still haven’t a clue why GC gets top billing) and the second pairing up their two biggest Cartoon Network licenses in an event that I can only imagine a few fans being pleased to read. When I saw it, I couldn’t begin to understand why two shows with completely different comedic styles and tone would be crossed over and what anyone would get out of it. I still don’t know even after reading the damn issue.

Have you read any crossover ever? If not, there is one trope/plotline that 98% of all crossovers follow. I call it the Justice League vs. Avengers plotline because that’s where I first noticed it and hated it. The gist is that you take two groups of heroes, have them meet via some cross dimensional bullshit, make them fight until they figure out that neither side is “bad” and then find some bad guys for them to chase around and easily defeat before a scene in which they say good bye and a lot of meta jokes are made. Also, two of the smarter characters will have found time to figure out how one side can get back home magically.

It’s the worst storyline I have ever read, and I have read it more times than I can remember. I’ve never once enjoyed it. It’s unoriginal and boring, but worst of all it’s written in a way that you get a cheap pop when the heroes fight for a second and then stop. Both sides are protected. It’s very much like wrestling in that each character gets their shit in, but no one walks away weakened or damaged. You can’t damage the brands, and so it’s very dull and uninspired.

I say all this because this crossover uses all of the first parts of the formula. Adventure Time people go to Regular Show world and fight… because. There’s a dick that’s cursed Jake and Finn, now they fight each other and say mean things. Blah, blah, blah, sent to another world to fix it somehow… fighting.

The issue is also annoying to read because when both worlds are introduced, they thought it would be cute to do a two-page splash and split it with both sides of the story. The thing is… the Regular Show side has dick all to do with the Adventure Time side at that point and isn’t interesting, funny or anything like the tone of the show. The AT side is all, “plot, plot, exposition, plot, trying to be funny, plot, trying to be funny”, while the RS side is all, “Boring, boring, trying to be funny, boring, don’t tell Rigby that you want to go to college it might hurt his feelings, boring, boring, done that before, okay the Muscle Man and High Five Ghost part was good.”

Guess what? The art looks like both franchises. That’s all I need to say because the structure is awkward and really BOOM! has got this shit on lock so it’s not like they’d pull an IDW and switch the art on a crossover and annoy the fans to save a few bucks. They stuck to what works, art that looks like the shows.

At one point I forgot that I was committed to reviewing this and stopped reading the book, there’s so much exposition, and none of it was funny or in the tone of either show. It would be one thing if one property were outshining the other, but neither is shining here. It’s not fun to read, it does the same old thing that every hero vs. hero story has done (hell, think Avengers vs. X-Men, did anything come from that?) and it’s only the first issue. It’s a hard pass for me and also something I doubt that Cartoon Network would make themselves.

Score: 1/5

Adventure Time x Regular Show #1
Writer: Conor McCreery
Artist: Mattia Di Meo
Colorist: Joana Lafuente
Letterer: Warren Montgomery
Publisher: BOOM! Studios