Baby Badass is a romp. It’s a good damn time and it shouldn’t be taken too seriously… unless you’re serious about your amount of fun. Also I guess if you’re really touchy about babies then maybe you won’t like it. But this isn’t a real baby so seriously pull your head out of your ass. The issue takes place almost entirely inside or around a bar in the not too distant future. The world sucks. We’re like one step away from being a Mad Max-pocalypse which isn’t a good thing. As great as those movies are (especially the new one) you wouldn’t actually want to live in that universe. It would be terrible. But in the story, we’re like a day away from it… but with better tech. Shit… maybe it’s more like Tank Girl. Ah you get the point.

We meet Joey. She works in a bar where every table has a pole and woman dancing on it. But she’s not ready for the pole. Her boss Shiver wants her up on the pole tonight, but she’s just an apprentice stripper and doesn’t feel like she’s ready yet. She’s left to her smoke break to think about stripping when she hears a baby somewhere out in the wilderness. She finds the little guy and wraps him in her top and brings him back in the bar. Her friend Shirl tells her to keep it from Shiver, but low and behold he finds out… things do not go well.

Cue Baby Badass or “little angel” as Joey calls him. He throws Shiver through a door and then takes on everyone in the bar. Let me just say that the hilarity I received from the rest of the issue was tremendous. I laughed at the violence. I laughed at the dialogue. I laughed out loud and not in the sense of just saying that I did, but I actually didn’t. I mean people in my household asked me what the hell I was laughing at; to which I give the same I almost always give, “I’m reading a comic.”

I won’t ruin any of the jokes in this review, but I will recommend that you listen to this week’s podcast in which I recap the issue as well. There you can hear the delivery, whereas reading them in this review would just steal their thunder.

The art is solid. Something about it fits the story quite well and so while it’s not the best I’ve seen or even a style that I’m particularly fond of, I like it on this series. I especially like the illustrated violence, because it’s comical rather than a gore fest. Not that I would have mind it being gorier, but there’s a great balance to the art that I hope the series keeps. That and seeing a baby perform all kinds of dismemberment it just funny in and of itself.

If you like comic books that are actually funny, a bit violent in the vain of Milk & Cheese or you’re a fan of Adult Swim… then Baby Badass is the book for you. There’s jokes. There’s boobies… okay one set one time, but it’s ridiculous so it works. Basically if you like independent comics because they produce stories you’d never get anywhere else… read Baby Badass. Read the hell out of it.

Score: 4/5

Baby Badass #1 Writer: David Schrader Artist: Tim Larsen Publisher: Hybrau Comics Price: $3.99 (P), $1.99 (D) Format: Ongoing, Print/Digital